No Stupid Questions

I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it's illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That's not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it's what I want and enjoy, and for right now it's affordable, and I'm happy with that.

One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.

They're not, and profit isn't the reason people run Lemmy instances. In fact, avoiding the problems that arise when human communication is capitalized upon is a driving theme behind open source software and federated social media.

Why does everything have to be for profit?

Like many said, it's not about profitability but sustainability. I signed up to donate $2 per month to help run the servers for lemmy.world. I'm very happy with this instance (and the fediverse in general) and want to contribute. There are plenty of other people willing to do the same. Together, we will make something much bigger and better than reddit over time.

I love their $8/month tier description: "The $8 verified user tier. You'll be allowed to place a blue checkmark behind your name. You'll have to do that yourself though. And you could also do that without donating ;-)."

They aren't. Do they need to be, though? Maybe once the scale gets gargantuan, but even then - is it strictly necessary to be profitable? As long as donations cover costs, I assume most instance administrators want what the rest of us want - a good platform for discussion and content aggregation.

The funny thing is that not all human endeavours actually need to be profitable for them to exist. It's perfectly fine and normal for people to be generous and provide services for the community for nothing in return and for some of those in the community to help out too.

I mean, Wikipedia does it and they're the 7th most visited website on the internet. 🤷

I am a proud monthly donor. My couple of bucks I send Ruud and the admin team every month helps make this corner of the internet a reality.

So, that's how it's funded.

If you're able, please consider sending in a donation. You can do so at Open Collective or Patreon.

They're not, it's just donations so far. Reddit actually used to profit from donations only too about 10+ years ago and had a bar showing how much they earned every day vs how much they need to run the servers.

I'm pretty sure Lemmy has been designed specifically so it can't me monetized. If you try to place ads people can just switch to another instance. If you try to split off from the fediverse I'm pretty sure there's enough data on other instances in order to clone your server along with its content (and mind that you don't own the copyright for posts made by users).

This has come up multiple times in recent weeks, naturally, but it's interesting that it's always framed as being about profitability. As if simply being affordable or sustainable isn't enough.

Communities being a source of free value for the server admin is always baked into the discussion.

Centralized, corporate social media has done... bad things for how we see and interact with the world.

The word you're looking for is sustainable, not profitable

They're not - Some instances have a clearer funding structure than others. I picked Lemmy.world in part because they have a clear source of donations.

https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld/donate?interval=oneTime&amount=20&name=&legalName=&email=

It doesn't have to be profitable. Especially for people that already have computers running 24/7 and good Internet, a Lenny server is just another process they run on their machine. Admin/mod duties would probably be the hardest part.

Things can be valuable without being profitable. A hug from someone you love does not generate any profit but is still a good thing that should exist. Likewise, a community resource like a Lemmy instance does not need to justify it's existence by being profitable. It can simply exist as something that people get value from. The fact that we often lose sight of this is a result of living in a capitalistic society that over-emphasises the value of something producing profit and underemphasises any other possible value. As for the implied question of, how does a Lemmy instance get the money to pay the costs required to run it? That's going to vary from one instance to another and how that money is raised should be a factor in which one you sign up to and which ones you connect with. In the case of Lemmy.world, it is, afaik, presently (and likely in the future) run as a non-profit for it's own inherent value and is funded by user donations. A big point of federated communities is to allow those communities to be able to operate for their own benefit, rather than be reliant on commercial investment that will later create a tension of different incentives.

Lemmy has so far made $0 total profit. So that makes them substantially more profitable than Reddit.

Donations, or with a small enough instance a server admin might just pay out of his or her own pocket. Maybe if Lemmy were ever to get much bigger there might be paid or ad-supported instances.

I think a big part of the point of federation is that the costs of hosting servers can be distributed so no one has to spend millions to keep their server running. That way there is less of a need to monetise an instance (and less of an incentive, as if you start doing anti-user stuff, people can just move to a different instance).

i contribute to patreons of lemmy.world and the developers of lemmy. hopefully there’s makes enough of us to make this financially viable

Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.

Is that you Huffman?

I think you might really be asking about sustainability, not profitability (profit is what you have after all the bills are paid). It's generally donation-based. I'm sure different communities will have different ways of soliciting donations.

EDIT: I'm no longer partial to the below. I much more like PrimalAnimist's suggestions.

~~For larger, expensive instances, I'm partial to determining the cost of running a single user over some period of time (say, 5 years), and posting that little datum on the community info. Then, each user that donates that amount gets a badge reward. Users that pay double the minimum get a different badge, and so on. Cycle the badges every n years. Some users will have fancier badges, displaying a kindness for the poor and badgeless. Cultivate a culture of gratitude for those who support, and you won't have to worry so much about not having enough.~~

Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.

Any Lemmy/fediverse instance could come up with a localized monetization scheme for people that browse through it, but it wouldn't affect other instances (or if they were injecting ads into feeds, they'll just get blocked by everyone else), but for the most part, it's got more of an IRC server vibe, no monetization needed when community volunteers are plentiful and the barrier to entry is low. Eventually 'big boys' like Lemmy.world will want a more formal and reliable way of paying for their server and bandwidth needs beyond primarily unsolicited donations ($ and time) by volunteers.

These are not profit generating services, they are community services. For now.

The short answer is it really isn't profitable, and will be hard to ever be profitable simply because of how it is indeed run by donations.

Being able to spread the load over many independent instances does help to spread that load.

The internet and even the web didn't need profit for many long years before the web went commercial. I've been publishing my own website since 1996 without advertising or asking for donations. I just publish it because I love the topic. Profit is NOT the be-all and end-all of existence.

Don't believe me? How much would you sell your children for?

It isn't atm

Lemmy is a non-profit that receives grant funding through NLnet's NGI0 Discovery Fund. And also - individual giving.

Individual instances can fund themselves how they want. Besides donations - there’s certainly a world where some servers start hosting sponsored content to keep afloat. Given that users have so many alternatives, there’s a limit in how much they could get away with.

There’s also a world in which small government would run and operate instances if this gets popular enough. No reason why somewhere like Estonia can’t do so as a promotion of their booming tech industry.

I'm donating $5 to the Lemmy devs and $5 to Lemmy.world currently on patreon.

Reddit the company has never been profitable either, it ran on VC investments for years. But more accurately, the real Reddit, the communities, never needed to be profitable because it was run out of passion for the subject matter of the subreddit. The former isn't a problem for the fediverse because there isn't an entity overseeing everything, the latter sorts itself out naturally as more motivated individuals join this community.