this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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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, etcβ¦ A server host canβt 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 shouldnβt 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 itβs 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