You're viewing a single thread.
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).
Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…
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.
I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.
A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.
Get a VPN to India or Turkey (there are likely a bunch of other countries too). It’s a lot cheaper: I pay around £1.50 (RS129) a month
They could do an annual fund drive, I'd gladly pitch in a few bucks
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.
The ad industry is really secretive in general. There aren't many studies proving that targeted advertising even works. If the data was even slightly in the ad industry's favor, they'd release it. Their entire job is spinning things to look good.
I suspect that targeted advertising was invented to justify the existence of advertising companies as middlemen. Take for example the ExplainXKCD wiki. They just serve their own ads which are usually for tech products trying to reach Sysadmins. If every company did this, the ad industry would wilt.
your post is very interesting for me to consider
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.
Edit: Here is a nice write up on why this might not be the best idea...
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.
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 $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it's relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don't think that's too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
I'm OK if it becomes a paid service and can block robots and spiders.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that's less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Yeah and here is how lemmy.world's owner funds his Lemmy and Mastodon instances:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
He said lemmy.world could handle 1 million users and mastodon.world at some point had over 100k active users.
Hell, that is like one impression per user per month on Adsense. You could put a single unobtrusive text ad on top and probably pay for your server
That's a good question that I'm unqualified to answer but I'm sure that [email protected] is a good resource for this.
That sounds unstable and unreliable.
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.
Yeah, I think by default Lemmy shouldn’t have ads, but if instance owners want to add them to pay for server costs it makes sense.
Though if they can survive off of donations, I agree that it’s way better that way.
Lemmy is the second largest federated platform, falling only behind Mastodon, and even still is nowhere near the size of Reddit. As it grows, the costs for the instance owners will grow too. Would you be open to a subscription model, where costs to run an instance are split between the members via a direct fee?
I thought Matrix was also bigger than Lemmy, but didn't see their numbers. Yes, I would be open to paying a small monthly donation or hosting a small instance.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn't like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.
The projects I mentioned weren't made for profit, but they are now so important that they are funded through donations. Both from users and corporate sponsors. With that money they are able to hire full-time developers. So they still cost our society money, but no ads or spyware is required. I think hosting could work the same way.
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.
Awesome! I think I read about that somewhere. Such people are my heroes. Not everything has to be made for profit and so many amazing things were made possible by the Free Software movement, which is all about user freedom, not money.
I understand why people are worried about the future of the Fediverse, but I feel like their standards might be too low when it comes to software. It would be better to have to watch ads here than doing the same on Reddit, but I really think we can do better than this.
The difference is that it's a hosted platform. This might an issue and if making it a pay only service doesn't come around, ads will. If that happens I'm outta here.
Lemmy's development was funded by the EU. They see a value in decentralized platforms. So perhaps they or some other organizations or corporations will be willing to donate money or servers to Lemmy instances. We should probably look into how Mastodon is doing this.
I know here in Canada that will never happen. Lemmy is just an interm solution for me until I can find something that can run in a terminal
What about this client? https://github.com/mrusme/neonmodem
Thanks. I'll take a look after I install BSD on my computer
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.
Just having ads is not a problem.
deleted by creator
When content gets federated to another instance, who does the advertising money go to? Does it go to the instance the content came from, or to the instance the content was viewed on?
As soon as ad's show up, bye bye.
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