3d ago

What Would a Fair and Community-Focused Monetization Model on the Fediverse Look Like?

I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.

The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?

This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.

TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?

72 comments

It's called Web Monetisation. It's a standard that's in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the "tip" button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say "I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction". Or anything else you can come up with.
That's it. The website operator doesn't need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you're done.

I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn't know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.

No monetization, donations only without begging.
Have any of you guys ever hosted... anything? It's not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say "server costs are expensive" are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.

There are a few ways to monetise the Fediverse.
Donations - to devs and those running the instances. Lemmy gets enough from donations and grants to have a couple of full-time devs but it still doesn't pay a lot. dansup using Kickstarter is proving interesting. Donations to your instance works well and a lot of places that offer this bring in enough to cover hosting costs but not much more. Open Collective has proved very good in this regard.
Classified ads - !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca does a decent job of bringing buyers and sellers together.
Subscription newsletters/blogs - Ghost is moving into the same space as Substack but with federation, so should do well.
So you wouldn't be able to give up the day job by running an instance but you might if you were the lead devs of a popular service or if you had a thriving following on Ghost.

I don’t see why the Fediverse can’t be run as non-profit and by volunteers. We are 8 billion people on this planet. I’m sure we can handle it.
- We can and we are.
  It's just that useful idiots have been convinced that nobody does anything because they actually want to do it.
  To them, the only reason to do something is to make money from it or distract them from bigger issues. It's why their lives only consist of working and playing video games.
  
  The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn't always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.
- I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don't look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
  Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
  
  But do you remember how they monetized email

Monetizing is what ruins other places.
I like the way my home instance does financial backing through an open model, and that's part of why I chose it.
An ideal is enough contributors to keep the lights on and to reimburse the admins for their time spent in keeping it afloat. Moderation should always be a volunteer position for those that want to support their individual communities.
Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs (to a point), feature development and then charitable donations in that order. Non-profit on paper and in practice.
This is viable for a small instance. Maybe even larger ones if the users are altruistic enough as a whole.
- Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs
  We need to normalize posting expenses along with donations.
  Let's stop trusting people when they say something costs "a lot." Have them share the actual numbers. Don't take their word for it.
- That's pretty cool, I didn't know that about lemmy.zip

Unsubstantiated claim: Any set of rules that aim at distributing money according to some merit can be exploited in a way that those who get the most money are not those providing the most value.
Or less formally: Any game can be cheesed.
- See Goodhart's Law

First question, why would we want monetization? people do amateur theatre, short movies for fun, volunteer do coach kids sport for fun so the whole society doesn't have to be commercial, and even Wikipedia is mostly ran by volunteers.
I mean sure, federated instance and some authors may get government grant for culture (which would be better spend than for commercial movies, or all the government money spent in AI) but not monetizing won't prevent people from contributing
- Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
  
  No, they really aren't, and they scale with users.
  Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
  I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.
  Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
  
  Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
  Doesn't that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It's just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they're willing to let their instance grow.
  That doesn't bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I've always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what's the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.

Instances could run stake pools and tie the two together somehow. Perhaps in this case, your username follows whatever pool you're staking to.
It's a solution look for a problem admittedly. It works better in the case that instances act as retail "clubs" like Costco for example. In that case, stakers to said pool could be authorized to get certain deals on products sold by that instance.
- First sign of crypto and I am out. I would speculate that is true of a lot of people in the Fediverse.
  From my perspective, there are only two use cases for crypto 1. Criminal activity 2. Pump and dumps
  
  Yeah! How dare people try to have wealth that is actually borderless and self-sovereign. Those idiots are scammers! I will own nothing and be happy. Get out of my way, I need to step in line to bow before the Federal reserve (an organization that I fully admit is corrupt to the core and the very root of the issues in our society). I'm actually a Marxist living in a capitalist society. So, I am too cool to worry about the fact that I actually need money. I'll just pretend that I don't need it even though I REALLY do. I'll do whatever I can to piss on viable alternatives to the Fed just because people were degenerate gamblers and got owned by obvious scammers. Sure the fed can take away my money for no reason, inflate the dollar so that my savings are worth less every single day, and do whatever they feel like with my money but that is a good thing because scammers exist in the world....

Would love to see an optional monthly subscription to Lemmy where funds are automatically distributed based on how you used Lemmy that month. There would have to be a lot of research on how to avoid exploitation, but Open Collective might have some good examples of how to securely handle funds like that
- I would love this, great idea

Something along the lines of a monthly donation model, perhaps with a nominal "pro" system. A badge to showing that you donate and how many years you've been donating (users can disable display of such badges if they want).
- I second something like this, don't make it compulsory but instead something people want to spend money to support.
- Great idea. Backed by some kind of Patreon for FOSS. Which might exist already, as I just learned here: Open Collective

Crazy idea here: would it be possible to have a model where everyone's phone is a mini personal instance, syncing with others when the user opens the app? When a phone is offline that phones content would be unavailable too, but that is part of the truly decentralised model.
- That would drain your battery pretty quickly since it would need to be communicating with other instances constantly

Well there was sub.club but it died.

Truly fair would be to have corporations pay.the users to allow them to show them advertisements.
- Couldn't agree more.
  Technology forums are usually just advertising boards.
- A corporation will only pay users to watch ads if it is a way to get them to buy junk that they didn't need or possibly even want. Otherwise the model breaks. Advertising is a scourge, to rely on it in any way does not feel "values-driven" to me.
  PS: to be clear, maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but, speaking personally, if I ever see an ad here, I am GONE and never coming back.
  
  maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but
  No, ads aren't necessary at all. They should be illegal.
  
  I agree it feels off, but it's better than what we have now. Users could allow certain companies' ads they feel comfortable viewing.
  The additional benefit for companies would be that they would have a direct finger on the pulse of the market. If they make a decision and they see a lot of users abandon their ads, it was probably a bad decision.
  The obvious downside is that people that can use the money will be under the influence of big corporations more.
- I mean honestly, why not? If a server admin chargers a $1 per ad the user should get $0.50. Crude example but you get the idea.

Look at what nostr community is doing with zaps, I think it's cool
- isn't nostr overrun with cryptobros?
  
  Cryptobros aren't really present on there, at least I never encounter such people. But it's mainly a "Bitcoiner Bubble" and that's why I have some issue with staying on there regularly, I don't like mind-bubbles. However there is some amazing experimentation on there with Value4Value or tipping sats (fractions of bitcoins) instead of liking, local-side open source algorithmes that you can choose and change and the thing I'm most excited about is Ditto which is a community server that act as a Nostr relay AND an ActivityPub instance.
  I think Nostr is superior to ActivityPub because you don't need accounts, it's authentification is based on asymetrical cryptographic keys which enable digital identities without a central server. However I use the Fediverse more because it is more mature, less mind-bubble and fucking better than commercial, centralized plateforms with opaque algorithmes that you have no control over.

Lot of terrible ideas here, if any of them are implemented lemmy loses a lot if value, donation model works, if a server cant survive itll shutdown and well end up in a better situation since the whole point was to not have centralized servers. Mfs talking about adding ads when this platform barely provides value lol. Like are you serious, at least most platforms with ads developed their own platform and arent just launching someone elses work on a server
- I agree. It really shows how conditioned these consumers have become.
  They're eager to be abused.
- If you want lemmy instances to be better off reduce the load, make your own or join a less popular one, joining a bigger one isn't a good thing (im a hypocrite, im on lemmee)

Still learning about the fediverse, but... What about a simple percentage system so you can donate whatever you want. A large portion goes to the instance that you register with and smaller portions go to Lemmy programmers. Maybe portions can be set aside for parts of the fediverse that we all use like gif/video hosting. I'd say make the percentages the same across the fediverse so people know what goes where.
Personally I'd prefer monthly giving like patreon.

I've been wondering if there's an opportunity for instance admins (e.g. lemmy.world) to offer managed instances for user domains.
It would be great if it was easier for the average person to own a domain and use it for email, matrix, Lemmy, etc.
- You mean a bit like WordPress.com model?
  
  Possibly, but I'm not very familiar with wordpress.
  I imagined something like:
  https://nextcloud.com/partners/
  The idea is that I could pay someone to admin the same services that they provide to the public.
  So like maybe lemmy.world and the other popular instances could offer a Lemmy instance, and maybe also offer: matrix, pixelfed, mastodon, etc etc.
  There are decent options out there for mainstream services like email, web, etc. but maybe not for more niche services like lemmy.
- Realistically no

Well depends if we're talking for instance admins, developers or users/mods. Would probably need different models.
Sub.club wasn't successful in offering a content monetization model on the fediverse

I think keep it donation based. Perhaps do a Lemmy gold where u can donate to boost a comment/post and said donation is split between content creator community instance etc.

72 comments