As someone who also doesn't fully understand stuff yet, best comparison I've seen is email.
I'm sure there are emails that cost money, but for the most part you can just. Move to a different email. If a group is on a server that's asking for money they can just change to another server, right?
In the old days of forums, it wasn't uncommon for a forum to ask for some small donations. which was never a problem (a good forum had a lot of good will and people willing to contribute). Remove the profit incentive and websites are not eyewateringly expensive to maintain.
It probably will be, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no lock in, so no admin can hold you hostage with their policies.
There's word that Eugene has plans to integrate some monetization features into Mastodon after the meeting with Facebook.
Don't even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it....
If Lemmy in general grows to the user base of reddit, infrastructure costs(if it was optimized via scale) would be in the tens of millions/year. Given that it's a hogepoge of mixed providers using expensive AF hosting probably hundreds of millions.
This very instance (lemmy.world) is scaling across multiple instances with load-balancing right now.
Don't even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it....
All donations right now. I like the idea of adding awards to subsidize server costs.
It's up to the instance owners and the users. I can see some instances running on donations, some will run adverts and everything in between. Users will choose instances they prefer. That's the beauty of federation.
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