Fediverse sustainability

That's like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.

I haven't seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.

Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don't speak up, I would conclude we don't have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?

Maybe it's that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.

I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.

We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.

Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.

The "financial aspect" is much smaller than you seem to think.

It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.

You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don't know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you're making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.

At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.

1. The server owners do it, by paying from their own pockets. Only viable as long as the server is small and the owners are deeply concerned with the success of the server.
2. A third party does it by sponsorship, advertisement, etc. Bad idea as they will eventually want to meddle with your content - astroturfing, selective enforcement of rules, etc.
3. The userbase does it by donations, membership, etc. Frankly I think that it's the most reasonable solution.

OP raised the concern that most people won't donate. Does it really matter? I don't think so; what matters is the total amount being donated, not who does it. If it is a concern, perhaps a subscription model could work, too, but the instance would need to show some service beyond what you'd expect from a Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin/etc. instance.

I'm from the belief that "ethical ads" are a trap. 90% won't be ethical, and the 10% left won't pay you much. That's how the cookie crumbles.

Another concern that I see is moderation, as it's part of what makes an instance viable or not. The old Reddit model (let users moderate users) is surprisingly good in this aspect, as it allows the server owners to only address server-wide issues, but IMO it needs to be improved on (for example, letting admins and mods recruit users for specific tasks - e.g. I might trust someone to remove content, but perhaps not to ban users).

I can only say that when the provider of my instance ask for donations, I will donate. Because they do a bloody good service on all sides and that should be honoured. I guess that this is applicable to all instances?

The moderation could be the biggest part of wanting to just quit. Humans are pretty shitty creatures especially when anonymity is involved. This definitely has nothing to do with finances. It’s not expensive at all. If someone shut theirs down due to finances then their life was probably crumbling and that can happen to anyone. What is your question?

Mine’s relatively small and I haven’t had a single donation from the ~400 users.

Also if they did donate, less than a dollar each, the server would be paid for an entire year.

As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly out of my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.

I think the real problem is not financial, but technical problems. For example, when a post is shared in an instance, that instance sends that activity to approximately 1000 other active instances. As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around :) I'm not sure how it will scale in the future.

In addition, since each instance keeps all the data in its own database, the database size of the instance with 1m users and the instance with 1k users is the same. In my opinion, this is what is really unsustainable.

Servers aren’t free though. So you’re going to get people who do it as a passion project and hope they have the tools to moderate their own instance or a small team of volunteers to help which is dependent on unpaid labor.

There needs to be money behind any stability.

You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a "free" one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won't happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.

I've wondered a lot about this.

Ultimately, I think we're going to need to compensate the devs, mods and contributors if we want this to succeed long term.

How to do that with a group that is (understandably) allergic to ads is another question.

I guess most instances are going to ask members a small yearly contribution, like 10$ per year or something. That could make the servers more sustainable

I dont think you are right that most people dont want to donate. All big fediverse instances are funded by users. Every user may not want to pay the few cents that it costs to host the instance for them but there are enough users that donate $10+ to cover hosting costs for the other users.

I've never run a server, so I can't really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don't see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.

Granted, I think you're totally right that there's a generally unsustainable attitude that's pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that "someone else will pay for all this". It's wrong, it's naive, it's unhelpful, and it's basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I've worked for non-profits and I've seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.

I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.

I'm open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we're going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of "influencers" and "sponsored content". That's inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.

Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that's potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it's reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.

My thoughts:

• I think this is ultimately about growth. The Fedi can survive in its current DIY donations based form, but growth, seems less likely I agree. This growth need not be crazy, I’m talking about normal healthy growth.
• The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
  • There’s also a bit of a privilege problem too I’d guess where underprivileged people are naturally pushed out of admin work because they just can’t afford to do it. I think it’d be culturally nice if that weren’t the case.
• so in a way a question here is whether admins and moderators should at least in some instances get some form of salary. I think that’s an interesting idea, and that the Fedi would certainly benefit from having people dedicated on a more full time basis to making things good.

Being all that, my general take is that for the Fedi to grow it has two major cultural issues it needs to address:

1. The lack of software collaboration and reusable and composable software
2. The aversive relationship with money, as you say. You can’t deny the existence of the capitalistic world outside, and doing so, no matter your values, will I bet ultimately come with some trade offs that maybe aren’t worth it and maybe more will not want.

Totally out of a blue idea. Probably stupid but… what if there was a system which shows the community in real time how much money is needed/dev,mod,hoster time is worth, and people “top up the jar”. No mystery of „they’re probably already been donated enough”. We’d see how much is needed. Probably would need to have a bit of trust to the receivers not to abuse it but… idk just random thought lol

Honestly even if the Fediverse is mainly run by corporations, that is still 100x better than the non-fediverse. Mainly because the direct and immediate competition from other instances will keep them in check. You can't pull shit like Reddit, when users could immediately leave and get an almost perfect substitute. And I believe there will always be a substantial amount of crowd or privately funded "community instances", whose major goal is just good social media.

Hmm. Does this mean that it's expensive to run this whole Fediverse thing and that the money is running out?

As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I'm paying approximately $40 monthly from my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don't mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.

I'll tell you what will make it unsustainable, getting banned "disagreeing" for criticizing and questioning the Terms of Service: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit