Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it's been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I'd probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
It already is. As soon as something like this is internet facing, you get search companies and now AI companies mining data to use for commercial applications.
In terms of the sites themselves though, it'll vary and depend. As it grows in populatity, there will be monetised content in plain sight (think all those secretly sponsored and advertising posts on reddits used to try and push products subtly - the bigger the user base, the more attractive it is to target users with hidden advertising), and then there will be what the servers do themselves. Some may exist on donations, but others may chose to try to place adverts, others may go for subscriptions.
Ultimately there does need to be money coming in from somewhere to keep the services going. There are many free success stories: Wikipedia continues to be free, without adverts, thanks to donations from users and sponsor organisations. Mozilla continues to produce a free open source browser through a mix of donations, sponsor organisations, and paid search deals. Linux is a huge free open system, with a mix of donations, sponsor organisations and commercialisation of the ecosystem.
There isn't really a reason why social media can't also be "free" for consumers, but we don't know yet how that will play out. On traditional social media, the user is the product - our data is mined, we're marketed at, we're advertised at, our data is sold on. The fediverse breaks alot of these methods - or more accurately it opens up these methods to everyone as anyone can access much of the data, removing the value companies have in monopolising and gate keeping the data. It's a double edged sword, but be in no doubt even in the fediverse companies can and will monetise whatever data they can get their hands on.
hopefully never
Municipal👏 Social👏 Media👏
Maybe one day some applications may open their own Server. I think that only on this server, the application will work, and the server and other expenses can be provided with the subscription system in the application.
Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.
There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.
Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...
To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.
Ask yourself these questions..
How long until http protocol is monetized?
How long until POP, IMAP and SMTP (collectively referred to as 'email') is monetized?
How long before torrents are monetized?
The answer is, quite nearly from the start you could .. but anyone can still do everything you could with those protocols by themselves, for free, without any strings. Still people monetized all those things early.
Because those are all just protocol, or a digitized agreement on rules of communicating fixed sets of information. Sets like an email, or a website, or a collection of files. No one owns any of these rules they just exist and any two computers can agree on them and use that to exchange information.
Fediverse is a protocol. Lemmy, kbin, mastodon, and the others are all just programs talking the same protocols. No one allowed any of them to do so, they just agreed to. All the entities that make up the fediverse agreed to the same thing, so all of them can talk to each other, in theory. In practice each one can choose which others it wants to talk to. Just like you can build an email client that just will not send emails to Gmail. It's not because it can't but because it doesn't want to.
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