this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? If all the other alternatives are crap but can survive because of their deep pockets, how can we ever expect the Fediverse to grow without supporting it regardless of its current size?
That’s above my pay grade. I honestly don’t know. However, I’ll offer that Lemmy instances are somewhat analogous to the hobbyist or special interest forums of yesteryear. A “webring” of sorts. Smaller, cheaper, manageable by dedicated individuals…
They’re not massive and centralized servers requiring all that goes with operating and maintaining them. Ad injection, legal teams, CEOs to pay…the fediverse is a completely different animal compared to big social media. It exists because of lots of little “pockets” and not the deep pockets of centralized social media.
I'd would hope that was the case with Lemmy, but it seems that the majority of people that moved are just going to the largest instances and trying to replicate what they had on Reddit.
For Mastodon, there are indeed a good number of servers run by a small group of friends who simply don't care about its cost, but it's getting pretty clear that any instance with more than 1000 active users is simply not sustainable on donations alone. Every month there is a new instance closing down because the admins realized that the cost per user are growing faster than the donation base.
That’s unfortunate, and doesn’t bode well for the growth of this platform.
Yes, and this is why I've been saying for months already that if we really want to have a viable alternative to shit services we get from Big Tech, we need to start putting our money where our collective mouth is.
That’s a tough hill to climb. The internet grew on the largesse of individuals who contributed time and financial support to smaller endeavors, whether it be software or a website. It’s going to be all but impossible to get people to pay for it when even big services like Facebook are free, that’s the conundrum and why ad revenue and personal profile mining is used to fill the hole. Unfortunately costs have risen sharply alongside bandwidth demands, so one can’t run a basement server without bottlenecking on size or costs long before reaching critical mass for a community - and that’s what you mentioned in regards to lemmy.
Like I said…above my pay grade. I hope there’s some way a distributed network like Lemmy can succeed, I really enjoy what it’s becoming. Maybe a hub-and-spoke system will be the final form…big instances supported by more commercial means and smaller instances run by individuals and private funds.
And to go back to your original response: isn't that at least worth of some appreciation? Do you need to wait for the network to grow to start supporting it now by subscribing to a provider that costs $10/year (less than a dollar per month)?
I'm not into supporting alpha or beta versions, and honestly I don't spend enough time here to justify a subscription fee. If it were more fully fleshed out and had a lot more of the niche communities I enjoy, you bet...$10 or even $20/year would be worth paying to support the servers.
Ok, we will start going in circles already, but isn't that a bit of a "self-defeating prophecy"?
You say you like what it's becoming, but you don't want to support bootstrapping it. At the same time, history is showing us that any attempt to make the fediverse more popular is making the instances to crumble under their own weight because there is not strong backing after a certain size.
It's $10/year that we are talking about here, not a life-changing investment. If everyone keeps expecting high-quality content and an already optimized system that is able to be a home of billions of internet users (because the only realistic way for you get all the niche communities here will be when there are so many people here to the point that makes even the long tail a sizable group), then we will never get it.
I understand the sentiment, but I can't stop feeling that it is too self-centered. I certainly agree that we do not need a billion people on the Fediverse, but at the same time I feel some moral imperative to free the billion people that are stuck on Big Tech networks, and we need to build an alternative for them.