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Unpopular opinion: I'm fine with ads as a form for instances to sustain them selves.
(self.lemmyworld)
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2023
40 points (72.2% liked)
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I am not fine with that. This should be community driven and not ad driven.
Server space or electricity wise, running an instance will never be free, and it will be more and more expensive as more and more successful Lemmy becomes.
Donations and such will only get Lemmy so far.
Most instance admins aren't here for profit. I'm hosting mine on dedicated hardware I already pay for, so it's zero added cost, even if I have to scale up a good bit. And if my instance grows too much for its bare metal server, I'll port it to a Helm chart and migrate to my production k8s cluster. Anything to avoid ads!
The Mastodon servers do it and I am sure Lemmy can do it as well. It also helps spread people to more servers.
Most of the people on he major communities like reddit were all on smaller communities long before. The internet has a long tradition of indie providers helping with the commons. Keeping things running can be done in a number of ways and many people are willing to foot the bill for an instance.
The issue you bring is more a problem when everyone insists that we all must be on a handfull of instances.
The protocol does not need this and the call feels like mainly a cope for UX issues.
Nooooot exactly.
See the way federation works is that each community on each instance has a list of other instances that has at least one subscriber on it. Every time someone does something on that community, such as commenting/voting/posting, it sends that information out to every instance on its list.
So say there's three instances (A, B, and C).
A has 1000 users.
B has 500
C has 10,000
Let's say they're all subscribed to some particular community on instance B.
A user on Instance A comments on a post. Instance A sends this comment to Instance B. Instance B tells Instance C about it so everybody is synced up (and presumably, tells A just to confirm they've received it).
So one action means instance B has to send out 1 or 2 messages to other servers, and in just those two messages was able to serve 11k users (plus it's own 500)
Now let's say all 11,500 users ran their own instance, and this community was on one of them. Again, it's a super popular community and everyone else is subscribed. Call it instance X.
Now, someone comments on a post on this community. Instance X now has to send a message to 11,499 instances. Every single action on this hypothetical network will cause several thousand messages to fly between them. Not efficient to say the least.
As someone else pointed out: according to Apollo dev Reddit gets at absolute most 12 cents per user per month from ads. Without data collection the ads would be far less profitable, so I'd say that donating 1 dollar a YEAR would actually result in more revenue for the maintainers than ads.