this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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One thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
They are popular, because it's a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can't do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
I'm thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused..).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won't be available (but then again I'd be the only one using it anyway).
But I'm still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won't have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it's overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it's relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don't think that's too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that's less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
That's a good question that I'm unqualified to answer but I'm sure that !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a good resource for this.
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
Just having ads is not a problem.
I don't understand why people think it's necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don't notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
Perhaps you are right. They also have server costs, but maybe they aren't as big. But other federated networks exist: Mastodon, Matrix and PeerTube. I don't think they have ads, so Lemmy should be able to at least reach their size without them. I can't say what would happen when it reaches a billion users though.
On the other hand the costs will be distributed among many instance owners, so I don't know why ads would be needed. We can have thousands of instances for example.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with "fuck you" levels of money with offers they couldn't refuse -- and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they'd completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE's media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501(c)(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we've gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I'm sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don't need advertisements or to profit.
I am happy that lemmy.world is here for the influx of users, setup a dollar donation to both the server admins and the lemmy devs. Long term I think I would be happy to find a server that only allows membership if people are willing to contribute, as that kind of user is more likely to contribute to better discussions (in theory at least).
Advertisements are fine, as long as it's not too hard to block, or if they follow the same rule as other posts in that you can always upvote/downvote and comment on them.
I don't think many instance admin would go for it though currently, as that would be the fastest way to turn your users against you.
I would prefer that ads NOT be the same as regular posts to prevent people from mistaking promoted ads for actual content. Reddit was really bad about this, you would click a thing thinking it was legitimate only to find out it was an ad after the fact. I want my content and my ads to remain separate. They need to be clearly marked (not stealthily marked like on reddit), the ratio of ads to content should heavily favor content, and they need to be dismissible.
Maybe admins could start with opt-in ads that they ask if you want when you create an account? Very few people would accept them but some would and even tho it wouldn't cover the costs it could help a bit. You definitely shouldn't just enable ads for all tho