I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.

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[–] [email protected] 52 points 1 year ago (24 children)

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.

[–] petunia 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

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

See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing

Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.

mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
switter shutdown because it didn't have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn't sustainable financially to keep it online.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Their problem is that they allowed themselves to become too big and unsustainable in the long run.

[–] petunia 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.

Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

If the instance becomes so big, that it depends on donations, then it is too big.

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