How much money are you ready to donate for Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed to succeed?
Just came out of a discussion when someone was arguing that "if everyone here would pay $10-20 per year, the whole platform would be completely different", but that seemed quite unrealistic to me.
What do you think?
If everyone had to pay $10-20 per year, no there is no way this would be sustainable in a million years.
However, I am personally definitely willing to contribute $10-20 to fediverse communities/projects. If I have the spending money, I am willing to contribute way more, I believe in this place and understand the threat of not having free, diverse, at least semi-decentralized spaces.
I think making people pay will only ever work along the "to each according to their means" model, there are too many people from too many vastly different socio-economic situations to suggest some kind of blanket cost. Ok, so I can afford it but what about someone who doesn't live in the same country as me with entirely different wages and cost of living costs?
No, it doesn't work, but asking for donations with a suggested amount I think is a perfectly valid way to fund fediverse communities and I will absolutely contribute that much.
Thank you for your comment
I donated 100€ to my instance 2 years ago and probably wont donate again for a while, unless there is a huge drop in donations to my instance.
Milan who runs tchncs.de which hosts a fuckload of different great FOSS services like lemmy, peertube, pixelfed, matrix, gitlab, and many more has a great breakdown of his donations and costs over time with plots and everything. https://tchncs.de/en/donate
He is getting enough to cover expenses, but not enough to pay for upgrades or for his work hours. The donation amount required per user (if everyone donated) to cover everything is around 0.30€/month. This is calculated with a rough (probably under) estimated user count and a sysadmin hourly rate of 60€. To cover just the hosting expenses its less than 0.10€/month
These numbers should get even better when scaling up to more users and even at this scale the full coverage would be just 3.60€/year/user. If you are just hosting one service that you can optimize the shit out of, all this should become much cheaper too.
But yeah realistically only something like 1-2% of users will donate anything that means the people that do donate have to give much more to make up for the ones that dont. This is fine tho because not everyone has money to give.
the whole platform would be completely different
This is not a good goal to have anyways lol
Thank you for your comment. Indeed, transparency definitely helps
It would be different for sure.
The cover fee at a bar or club is to do a few things.
The positive is that it keeps out the undesirables that won't spend more money in that bar.
The negative is that you attract a whole different set of people. People who believe paying gives them exclusivity, or higher status. It tells scammers that the people in this room have money. It shuts out really smart people who don't have the resources but could contribute in other ways.
So yeah, the community would be different. Maybe even shittier.
Makes sense
Zero. I also won't watch ads.
I've already donated to various open source and fediverse projects. I think of it as an insurance policy against takeover: as long as the majority of the money that helps run the instance comes from people that want it to be free and reasonable, it won't instantly become the opposite.
Think of it this way: whenever Leon calls it Wokepedia, I am so happy there is a rational place where I can find unbiased information, and I make a note to donate. I know a lot of people that can't afford to donate, so I add a little extra for them. And I know a lot more that say they can't afford to donate and honestly that is such a shame.
$50 anually wouldn't be an issue, maybe more depending on my mood.
$10-20 per year
That's approximately what I would chip in to the server I call home.
$1/month, $10/yr annual.
Somethingawful does $10 accounts but has a heavy hand in banning them. IIRC you can pay to get someone else banned too. Fun forum.
IIRC you can pay to get someone else banned too. Fun forum.
That's next level
I kind of liked the server side profit concept of paying to ban people who'd paid for an account if they had pissed you off enough. It might seem harsh but not only did it keep people in line, it wasn't that much money and it paid for the servers themselves.
I had an account there for a few years then eventually asked "What's the deal with research chemicals for drug use? What site do people goto to buy them?" and was banned for attempting to source drugs. So I lost my $10 account, wasn't too fussed but never got round to signing up again.
These days I'd look to tor/onion sites for drug purchase, but I'm out of the loop on how to do that too.
$0, I don't give money to social media platforms.
One dollar for every person on the service who hasn't yet considered me a pariah. I'm actually serious about that.