Lemmy

The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do

also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao

Did mastodon die, without funding?

Well, it's working right now, isn't it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.

I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.

My prior comment was moderated out of the thread silently?

Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There's plenty of ways to make money without VC.

Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don't know...

Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that

There's also the option if user-owned cooperative (like social.coop) - https://blog.opencollective.com/social-coop-a-cooperative-decentralized-social-network/

There are also some masto instances that have their own lemmy instances, funded through their existing funding structures - https://merveilles.town/about

How about "let's support kbin. Lemmy is a tire fire waiting to happen as it seems to be written by tankies."

People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn't, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.

The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don't have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.

If you have ever browsed sites like questionablecontent.net, you may have noticed that they have a privately hosted ad server where people can reach out to Jeph and buy ads for his site.

This is a fairly rare occurrence as the requirements for the ads that he approves are pretty strict from what I understand and he's not just going to hawk the latest caffeinated Seltzer vitamin water blend to his followers.

That being said there are a lot of self hosted ad platforms that can be easily monetized and allow the site owner to dictate exactly how intrusive the ads are where the ads are coming from and to ensure that the ads effectively blend into their site design.

But a more realistic approach would be to ask users to pay an annual fee or something.

If I knew that the community was fairly strong and robust I wouldn't mind paying $10 a year or something to keep my community vibrant and strong, or rather than going with a fixed annual amount if they were to put out a donation drive the way Wikipedia does then I might be tempted to throw a little cash when I'm feeling flush.

If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you've missed the point. It's federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.

The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it's interconnected, it's self-managing, and it will scale only until it can't and then it will peacefully split.

like the rest of the Fediverse: through ingeniosity, community and self-organization!

(understanding "make money" as "pay for its infrastructure and maybe for some dev and other of the essential work now ran by volunteers" not as "profit")

When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

If you'd like to help us out, here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we're working on something worthwhile.

What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That's where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there's a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.