this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
2085 points (98.7% liked)
Fediverse
27727 readers
1086 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I feel it, can barely reply from all the errors being thrown.
I feel bad for the lemmy.world admins that have to keep up with the software needed and costs accrued to handle the world knocking on their doorstep. I hope advertisers hit them up soon so their bills become easier to pay. While advertising was annoying on reddit, I'm more than willing to put up with it on this instance of lemmy, the admins have earned it.
Please just donate... No need to invite ads here.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it may become necessary.
Donations can be a saving grace if enough people donate regularly. But such is dependent on people's willingness, their own financial stability, and how stressed servers are (how much it'll cost to upgrade and/or maintain infrastructure.)
It's great if it's viable. Means there's less outside influence. But that's if.
As far as I'm aware, Wikipedia has been able to maintain it purely off donations. But I'm not sure if Lemmy could.
Maybe? One thing Lemmy does have going for it is that the majority of users seem to be aware how... Fragile? the fediverses can be. There's arguably more passion behind the users and maybe willing to throw support out.
But hard to say.
Just joined their patreon today!
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it's enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Or maybe nonprofit organizations. Though I'm having a harder time imagining why they'd need a social network site, especially if it's federated with our shit posting "sublemmies" or whatever we're calling them here.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It's absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
Could yes.
But only if they're able to survive and thrive. Money is a very tricky thing.
As for my example, I was talking more about something like Red Cross (random example) wanting their own Lemmy insurance. Why they would want that. I was really just jesting about the shit posting
Wikipedia is able to pull that off because wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia, not a social forum to add comments to or respond at a massive scale like lemmy is or reddit was. A majority of services either get their revenue from ads, or they start off not doing that but eventually have to cave in and let ads in.
I think ads can be annoying sometimes, but if they're done in a similar way reddit did them before their downfall, then it would be tolerable and at least give the lemmy.world admins enough money to cover server running costs
I think this is an unpopular stance here. I'm not certain how else admins keep things running, but my limited time on Lemmy suggests people are hostile to ad-influence on how things run.
Ruud also runs Mastodon.world which has 160k+ users and manages to survive on donations alone. Not sure where the cutoff point is for when that is no longer viable, if there is one. Mastodon.social is huge and takes sponsorships and also gets some grant money I believe. They don't run ads per se though and claim all sponsors accept contracts stating Mastodon is not going to be run in a way that is influenced by sponsors.
Just stop accepting new people
There's no reason to not push them towards other instances
I'm beginning to feel this way too. We need to distribute the load, especially at this early stage.
What is also missing from the big picture is a dedicated "About" link in the navbar of Lemmy instances, providing users with a statement of detailed information on the people/organizations behind a given instance, its location in the world, its hardware, etc. A byline in the front page sidebar isn't enough.
I hate to be the one to say this, but yeah, there's a big reason why they shouldn't be pushed to another server, at least not right now at this switchover from Reddit point in time.
Most normal everyday people don't even know what federation is, and tend to not like it when they find out, as it causes extra work on their part.
They just want a central location where everyone is socializing together, and don't care at all about the fediverse, except as maybe an escape hatch if some c-suite type goes evil.
There's already a hurdle people jump over on change in general, so we should minimize the effort of that change and coming over to Lemmy from Reddit.
Edit: typos
I created an ~~instance~~ user on programming.dev and have had almost no issues seeing other posts.
You don't need to understand how it all works to use it
with this pace of growth i wouldn't blame them if they got advertisements. and i believe that most people here use adblock anyway
Try another instance, as close to your home as possible.
You can browse the map here https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/map
Good idea, opened up another account with our northern Canadian brother sh.itjust.works/ for backup
Yeah, I also have one on lemmy.ca, the ping is more consistent (both are 2-3ms).
That’s really neat but the closest servers are private, lol.
I wouldn't sweat so much picking a close server as long as it has enough users to be around for a while, reasonable rules, and isn't under too much strain. Just by getting off the big servers, you'll have a much faster experience and access to the same content.
I moved from lemmy.world to this one that specializes in my interests, and it's running great.
Those are good tips, thanks, I found a smaller one recently and it’s MUCH better, things are actually loading now, lol.
It's comfy; my setup almost never fails to load or post anything after load-balancing myself elsewhere.
Good tips! I should have explained a bit more, but by getting a server as close as possible, your ping should theoretically be lower than an instance that's far from you (I know, the internet is not a straight line to the server).
The best way to test this is by pinging the server in a CMD prompt/terminal.
Indeed. If I remember correctly VLemmy is in Ireland, and yet I've gotten consistently fast responses from it except during server upgrades. I think the size of the instance really does matter here.
I paused using lemmy.ml because 90% of the time it doesn’t work
I tried changing my profile picture on both desktop and mobile and keep getting thrown an error :/
Well at least it’s not something that super important
I can wait