People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.

Nope. You're the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.

Good to see it making a comeback.

Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.

"Do awesome things"

BEANS

This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you're not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.

Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.

When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.

When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.

No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes -- and we can move.

Wikipedia's innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There's always someone "wrong on the internet" somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.

Reddit seemed incrementally better than most -- up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.

I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”

We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.

Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community

One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.

Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.

I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.

It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.

That's not really the saying, it's what everyone thinks the saying is, especially Karen's, but it isn't.

The saying is "the customer is always right, about the price". I.e. that value of a product is equal to what people are prepared to pay for the product, not what you'd like them to pay, as a business owner.

It has nothing to do with businesses have to appease customers, regardless of whether they're being ridiculous or sensible.

And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.

This is open source. We are neither products nor customers - we are all test subjects.

People always forget the last part of the quote: "The customer is always right in matters of taste."

;-)

Thanks a lot for the post! Super nice to hear. Would also like to point out that "the customer is always right" was originally meant for sales. I.e. if they want a meat themed car, sell it to them, dont tell them its in bad taste. So for more ways than one treat those that serve you with respect. Theyre serving the community, not your servants.

It's like hanging out at a friend's house. Follow their rules.

so a real question if a one instance decided to setup for advertising and used that money to pay mods would that be acceptable?

On the Fediverse you are a user, not a customer, not a product.

While I agree and love the idea, it's going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:

• It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
• The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

I'm honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API's without getting ads).

We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.

For now I'm enjoying things, finding it a bit "slow" but that's been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.

To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:

"A beginning is a very delicate time."

What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive "consumers" we've all been corporately groomed to be.

I think more instances are the answer because this activity can't be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc

This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don't know what that looks like.

Lets see what the future brings. As long as the user count is low there isn't much of a problem, but if instances suddenly have millions of users, it will get expensive for admins to run the service. If too few people donate (what is usually the case), admins are forced to search for other ways to finance the infrastructure. The other point is AI, wheter you like it or not, if Lemmy is big enough, the content (conversations etc.) will be used to train LLMs. Also, the content will certainly be interesting for advertisers to learn user preferences. The difficulty comes with scale.

The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.

The full original quote was.

The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?

That is all I have to add.

Extremely well put. Not the customer or product but the citizen. And try paying taxes if you're able. This is a FUBU type of thing.

Thank you for the reminder, it's a breeze of fresh air with all transparency on this platform that's we're not used to - coming from Reddit. I can only hope that this "movement" persists and that lemmy or any similar fediverse app will eventually become the norm. It certainly feels inevitable to me, having seen that the grass is greener on this side