Instead of ads Lemmy operators should be paid for hosting. Users should be asked for funding on a periodic basis (perhaps a small number of subscribers could fund the entire hosting for all.)
No one should assume this is all free forever.
this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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I can imagine an instance having a fundraising goal and different communities competing for how much they can raise.
Who are these imaginary users you think assume this is all free?
There are plenty of people who think they are "contributing" just by posting. Servers don't run on memes.
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Ads are bad, why not sponsorships?
Like ask big server hosts if they would run parts or all servers for free if they get mentioned in certain areas or so.
Like in the FAQ, Header Or whatever.
Because these instances are often run as hobby projects and out of passion, not to be sustainable.
The Fediverse isnt corporate, we're a community and nothing will change that. We don't want to make money, we want to bring back what social media was supposed to be.
Additionally, it has become part of the culture of the Fediverse to regularly remind your peers to donate to your instance, as they're who are running this all for our benefit.
The epitome of a reddit user...
I would be very curious to see the cost of running an instance, especially as the user base grows
You can see the costs for lemmy.world on the blog for the associated mastodon instance mastodon.world.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone will do an ad-supported service. Or just do a straight-up subscription service -- I mean, Usenet providers do that. Means that you don't risk having your instance just vanish, someone handles security updates and load issues and so forth. Different models could coexist at different levels of reliability and performance and whatnot.
On the reliability issue, from my very quick skim, my kneejerk reaction is that I do think that the Fediverse might need some improvements in dealing with resillience due to instances going down permanently. As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down. Publish a pubkey prior to an instance failing, and then permit a "transition to a new account" mechanism where a user can prove to the system that they are an older user. Key management -- storing and retaining a private key -- might be a bit of a pain without a third-party app, as I don't know if there's a convenient way to do that in browsers today.
Another might be having some mechanism to deal with node failure. Freenet deals with having a fundamentally-unreliable distributed storage mechanism by having a level of forward error correction and then distributing some redundant data around the network so that it's possible to regenerate a certain amount of lost data when a node leaves the network from the data on remaining nodes.
As it stands, I don't think that lemmy/kbin have something like that. They must retain copies of some of the data -- hence the "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance" message that kbin shows if I'm looking at a community on lemmy.world from kbin.social. But unless it's cryptographically-signed by lemmy.world, if lemmy.world vanishes forever, kbin.social cannot prove that its copy of data originating from lemmy.world is authentic, so it cannot be made re-available to other lemmy/kbin instances.
Yes something like this should definitely be implemented. Mastodon has the feature of "moving your account" from one instance to another, but I haven't tested it yet. Don't know if it has anything like you mentioned like key management.
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As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down.
This is the one thing that bugs me the most with ActivityPub - identities are tied to instances. Hopefully folks are still working on nomadic identities.
I'd like this to be avoided as much as possible. But I am a bit weary about the fact that even small instances have to copy everything else on the Fediverse and thus will be very strained. Or do they copy the stuff only when their user wants to view it? Not sure how it works.
Would ads be of much value on a lemmy instance? Almost nobody using lemmy would not be using an ad blocker. And if an instance integrated ads, other instances would have access to their communities without ads unless you do some kind of "native content" scheme where some of your posts are ads which I don't think anyone would tolerate.
I could see maybe sponsorships with locally hosted shout-outs in the sidebar working for some people.
Donation based funding has historically been used amongst the fediverse and is therefore the most likely path forward. I'm also partial to this model as it prevents predatory changes towards increasing ad revenue. We see many content creators and organizations (such as the lemmy devs themselves) utilize donations as a method towards preserving the FOSS spirit of the platform whilst supporting these projects part/full time or just server and maintenance costs.
I am of the opinion that in the long term, donations will also be the best way to preserve Lemmy's independence from profit based oversight by staying ad-free and the instances that step away from this and embrace ads most likely will be the ones that already have stepped away from the spirit of Lemmy by defederating. I have no interest in remaking reddit and many others feel the same so I am more than happy to donate and enjoy other FOSS projects.
AO3 is a huge website that makes money purely off of donations. They often get like quadruple the amount they ask for every time they ask for money. Wikipedia comes to mind as well, although I'm not sure if they only make money off of the donations. Instead of donating to a third party service, Lemmy should build in the ability to donate into the website.
Maybe something like DuckDuckGo's ads that respect DNT?