It doesn't.
If you are on my instance, for example, its hosted out of my own pocket.
I have a TON of spare compute resources laying around, and I am more than happy to donate them to this cause.
Edit- lets also be perfectly honest- hosting lemmy costs FAR less then it costs me to host plex for friends/family.
It costs me exactly $4 a month to operate my server. If it grows to the point where I have to ask for donations, I will, but for now I operate it at my own expense because I can afford it.
Out of curiosity, what are you doing for hosting? I'm interested in hosting an instance, but I'm not sure what kind of hardware to throw at it.
I’m using a Hetzner cloud box running Ubuntu
Wow, that's really cheap! I should check it out now.
Worth mentioning:
The Lemmy project also receives grants from NLnet (funded by the European Commission), whenever they finish milestone features. According to the developers, this was their main source of funding until very recently and are now asking for more donations.
Lemmy isn't a company, it's just the software. The devs develop it as a hobby, basically.
Your server is lemmy.world. It's unclear how it will be funded as it gets big. If it goes under someone will start another one, though.
Actually- they are full time working on this.
The devs... have socialist tendencies(by their own admission, their words, not mine!), and are more then happy to live on peanuts and bread while building software for the better of humanity.
However, donations to the project, do pay for their basic expenses.
Wow, that's impressive! Not many open-source developers don't need a full-time gig.
IIRC they're openly Marxists-Leninists.
Haha don’t need to treat socialism like a taboo, there’s more to the world than the US and laissez-faire capitalism.
lemmy.world is run by the same people as mastodon.world and it is already donation funded. They post financial updates on their blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/
Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it's basically donations... either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.
But to put into context how much money we're talking about...
Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course... those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.
Do note, HOW they are hosting, pays into this a lot.
I have a server I host things on here locally-
256G of ram, 32 cores/64 threads. 130T of storage. Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Coral TPUs. Lots of NVMe too.
It costs 20-30$ of energy, along with internet use-costs.
Hosting, something of that scale in the cloud, would be outrageously expensive. However, here in my local home-datacenter, with redundant power, internet, and everything, its honestly not that bad.
And- I assure you, there is redundancy. My lemmy had basically no downtime AFTER getting hit by a tornado, and power to the city being out for most of the week.- > https://lemmyonline.com/post/3751
I patreon $5 month to my server - startrek.website
That's exactly what I do. But in euros.
That's the best part, it doesn't!
You're spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it ~~out of the goodness of their heart~~ for various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, lust for gold, being born with a heart full of neutrality, etc).
My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it's a good idea to run your own server.
I've been thinking of hosting my own instance for myself, but I was wondering if you'd noticed any oddities! I've heard of some bugs that occur when interacting cross-instance. Also stuff about content being out of sync, which I notice currently with lemmy.ml from my current instance (lemmy.world).
I can't say I have, but I basically only browse from my instance, so I may very well be missing out on things I could see on the instance the community is based on. I have noticed that .world and .ml are usually very slow to return results for my searches (as well as some other large instances like sh.it-just.works), and I have had trouble getting them to acknowledge my subscription (retrying a few times over a few hours or days works). I think this is basically because they are still overloaded, at least periodically. If .ml is slow to federate because it has lots of federation work to do and .world is failing to accept requests due to load that sounds like a recipe for sending of posts, comments, votes, etc. to have to retry over a period of minutes or hours, if at all.
If you are running your own instance it would marginally increase the federation load on e.g. .ml in the example above, but since the server you run isn't overloaded you would most likely see things on your instance after .ml's first attempt to send you the post/comment/vote/whatever. The ideal would be lots of medium sized instances that can handle the load so that there isn't too much federation work to do (having only one user per instance would mean servers need to federate to thousands or even millions of servers, which would be a lot of work and bandwidth), but at the same time no single server would be too overload to handle the incoming messages either.
since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom
It's their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more ~~power over~~ users, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I'll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it's own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the "real" one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn't work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it's a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
I suspect that with time (and support) the Devs will probably introduce account-migration.
Yes, and I think that's probably a necessity. But that doesn't help if the server has already gone offline, you'd need notice I expect.
It’s non profit by default, the very thing that social media needs.
People who run Lemmy servers do it at their own cost. That’s not to say they can’t run ads or choose other ways to become profitable. The big difference between a lemmy instance and something like Reddit is that anyone can start a new instance if the current one goes to shit. If the admins do something the users REALLY don’t like, they can migrate to another instance way more easily than switching platforms.
Reddit is counting on the effort of switching platforms being too high for lemmy to gain traction. They are wrong.
The developers do it for free, which is common in the open source community. There will always be volunteers to build the software and donors to support them.
I have wondered how migrating instances would work. Would anything come with me to a new account on a new instance or is it still similar to moving from Reddit where I'm starting over?
The world's most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it's certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.
I am already running a server for media streaming, nextcloud and minecraft. For sure i have room to add a small lemmy instance soon, not everything needs to make money or even be electricity even. But for larger instances though they must be gething some donations.
Everything needs to generate some sort of value - I imagine a lemmy instance would generate value for you in the form of learning, or maybe the sense of accomplishment from maintaining a community. That differs from how centralised social media generates value in the form of data or money which is usually at odds with the userbase.
A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.
The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I'd imagine largely pro bono.
I think lemmy.ml was getting money from NLnet by completing Milestones, but now that they're scrambling to handle bugs and doing Q&A constantly I think they're losing out on that funding. At least that's what Dessalines reported, I believe
That's the neat part. You don't.
It doesn't make money. It's funded either by donations, or out of the pockets of the instance owner(s). It doesn't mean that in the future, an instance owner wouldn't just decide to start serving ads, I don't think theres anything stopping them from doing that other than the threat of being defederated by other instances.
Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.
As it turns out, it's not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you're interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!
More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they've built! They usually don't have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you're enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.
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