I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
The fediverse is not a single database or server. It’s a protocol and standard that’s distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can’t be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they’ve stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.
Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you’re not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it’s a closed source centralized monopoly.
One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that’s something that can happen in the future
A point of caution:
A large company absolutely could come in and absorb the majority of lemmy traffic and build proprietary code and features on top of the main protocol, eventually making the open source protocol obsolete and supplanting it as a paid/closed-source service. It has been done repeatedly by tech companies, and it is the main reason many people distrust Meta’s interest in joining the fediverse.
For all the reasons you just mentioned, we should fight tooth and nail against that from happening, but we should at least be aware of the threat.
I think the email comparison is apt. We are currently in the bbs/dial-up ISP stage of the fediverse. When people had aol.com or netcom.com addresses.
That gave way to powerful centralized services such as Hotmail or rocketmail, that had the promise of never changing your email again. We then saw Gmail become the big boy on the block with amazing technology.
Even with these powerful entities, there were still hobbyists and corporate email.
I predict the fediverse will follow a similar path. lemmy.world and beehaw are like the netcoms, or even the bbs’s, basically hobbyists, and Internet communists setting things up for the common good, or simply because it’s fun.
We’re going to see instances fill up, become unstable, unreliable, etc. People will get frustrated when Lemm.ee, or their preferred instance can no longer support the volume they have attracted. We’ll see a professional service like a Hotmail that promises a forever home. You’ll likely also see vanity instances like what rocketmail offered. Given the nature of the interest based servers, we’ll likely see vanity instances come about singer than they did with email: starwars.fedi, lotr.verse, piano.lemmy, etc.
Once corporate interests start to see value in a powerful, stable instance that can collect user data and serve targeted ads (starwars.fedi is easy to target), they will dump enough money to push out the hobbyists. The hobbyists will not go away, but they won’t be needed anymore.
That’s when you’ll see the disruptor. Someone who comes into the space like Google did, and the fediverse will be an open protocol that is dominated by a few massive interests.
All in all, I’m not predicting doom, just the natural course of events, which actually will be great for the fediverse. Just like I love my gmail.com account more than my hotcity.com account, I think the future of the fediverse is bright, even if corporate interests get heavily involved, and dominate the 'verse, because there will always be room for innovations, and hobbyists, and while a single company could dominate, the protocol is still open for anyone to do their own thing, and not be bound to a single company if they don’t want to be.
I think this is spot on. It’s completely foreseeable that a well funded enterprise could stand up an instance that’s super robust and can handle a lot more traffic than current ones. They could, say, attract celebrities to do AMAs and handle the load. Or maybe they could create some communities that they stock with a giant amount of useful content.
They’d do it for free, and it would just be another instance, but it would become invaluable, with more and more communities hosted there, and more and more users making it their home instance, until the owners felt they were valuable enough that they put their content behind a paywall or they start serving ads. Sure, people could just move to other instances, but the point would be that suddenly doing without them would be painful.
But unlike Reddit or Twitter, it’s not as much as all or nothing situation, and other instances can compete in the same realm.
Sounds like Microsoft’s embrace, extend, and extinguish
I haven’t read a ton about it, but isn’t this what Meta is potentially going to do with Thread?
That is the worry, yes. There’s very little incentive for them to join the fediverse as a for-profit company otherwise.
I think there are benefit of killing twitter, mocking el*n and skirting europe regulation on moderation laws. But the worry is there, I hope the devs stand their ground and rejecting any doubious modification from meta on fediverse protocols.
Please don’t start obfuscating words. Elon.
standing our ground means defederating any and all meta servers as soon as they’re identified
I’d be surprised if there’s more than one Meta instance, as “multiple instances” tends to make the UX more confusing for those who are unaware of it. So it shouldn’t be hard.
they’d abstract that away for their users, they won’t know or care. And if one instance gets blocked, they’ll just spin up a new one and migrate the data. Meta users won’t have to think about the whole fediverse aspect of it because it they had to, it would never get off the ground. So meta has to abstract it away or it’ll be DOA. Which means we have to keep blocking any and all meta instances when they’re identified as such
Yes but you need to sign their NDA to be sure.
What’s the background on this?
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Zuck did an interview talking about how they were looking at doing a spinoff of Instagram, using Fediverse, for text based social media. Basically a competitor to Twitter. Rumor mill says it’s call Thread, or maybe he said that in the interview, I can’t remember.
I deleted the wrong comment, but responding here. I was thinking Thread like the home automation standard all the big companies are doing together. Figured Facebook was in on that. I did hear about the Fediverse entry though, just missed the name (which I bet they won’t use).
Incidentally, Google is kinda doing this with email.
If you run your own email server for your business, they will rate limit you under the guise of spam protection, even if your emails are never caught in their spam filters. Some business reported up to 12 hour delays on their emails being delievered. They want everyone to use preferably their own service, or at least another major giant’s, so they can push the smaller players out of the market.
TIHI
Yeah that’s a great point. I think it would be hard to fully lock other clients out, but you could have an early internet style situation where you had some websites not supporting all browsers.
No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.
Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.
Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.
Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.
Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.
I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.
Hopefully it ends up like wikipedia
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You mean promotion. Not all promotion is bad. When a game developper posts a content update about their game, that’s promotion. And I think most subscribers of that community will be pretty happy to see that kind of promotion. It’s opt in.
I wonder if the mod who deleted my comment is in denial, or trying to cover their ass.
You’re just not noticing that the ads are ads.
I’ve been on Mastodon for months and haven’t noticed any ads. Just people letting me know about some product they like. Wait…
Nonsense. This place is refreshing, like the bold taste of New Coke.
I just got thirsty all of a sudden.
Cuke?!
I love Cuke!
[ smiles with brown teeth ]
It’s heaven in a can!
That’s been always the case on other platforms on top of the official ads. Damn every now and then you’d see what’s clearly an guerilla ad campaign hitting the front page of reddit.
Oh shit was I the ad the whole time??
Course not, if you were, i’d be able to tell, since i’m using the new Rayban® Aviators© Digital edition, now with poser ID embeded and polarized lenses with Spez protection.
Dude! They looked so sick when I saw them in your profile pic while eating my Magic Spoon
laughably expensivesuper duper healthy cereal!I would have paid for spez protection. But it wasn’t available so I came to Lemmy lol
We call that a condom, but it’s too late for spez.
The real ads were the friends we made along the way.
Maybe we are all ads on this disgraced day
Speak for yourself
Reddit got WAY worse in the last 5-7 years though. I think corporations got more ok with it after best practices were both cemented and more publicized after the 2016 presidential election. Previously astroturfing was there for political campaigns and state actors, but more shady. Then Russia went off the rails with agitprop, Cambridge Analytical was all in the news, and everyone realized how pervasive and easy it was. Now everyone does it, and often.
Nonsense, “No, Stupid Questions!” is actually sponsored by “Barbie”, only in theaters July 21st.
If you have real evidence of this then you have a duty to share it.
There are no ads, just as there are no added flavours in McDoubleBeef 100% flavour and 200% beef!!!
Astroturfing is just a reality we have to live with online.
The big difference with Lemmy is that it’s not really a service, it’s a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don’t want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.
Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don’t have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.
Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.
Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don’t have dictatorial control over their users.
Spez’s fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it’s your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it’s the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.
The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We’re also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they’re so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.
It’s conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?
Hadn’t occurred to me before - I guess instances/mods can limit the number of new users they take in so it doesn’t impact performance too much.
Yup - as the admin of a small instance, I plan to keep it small. I want to contribute the Fediverse but not have this become more than a hobby.
okay
Doesn’t really make sense, if they’re federated then you wouldn’t need to pay them to access their content. If they’re not federated then what are you paying for?
You’re paying for reliability, continuity, possibly a domain name which may give a sense of exclusivity. By joining a “free” server, you don’t actually have a contract or terms of service.
The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.
Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.
As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it’s very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.
Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.
Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.
Depends how successful we are in fending off Zuck from trying to muscle his way in. That’s probably the first challenge.
Otherwise this is a non-issue, as there will simply always be both kinds. Nothing is stopping you from simply Self-Hosting your own Lemmy server.
I’m lazy. Checkmate!
For real though, lots of money is a great motivator.
Yes, which is why you should pick your server with care. If you do not pick one that suits your desires, that is on you.
This will not be as effortless as reddit any time soon, so if that is your goal, you may prefer it over there.
Nope, no way I’m going back. However, I’m still fairly new so I haven’t really “researched” which instances I should be joining. Except for lemmynsfw…for obvious reasons. LOL
If they want to crate a Lemmy instance so badly, why don’t they? It’s open source, everyone can host an instance if they want to.
The only thing I can imagine is that they’re restricted from monetizing it due to some rule of the license
The problem they’re seeing with Mastodon is all of the communities that are vowing to never federate with their instance because you just know it’s going to turn into EEE.
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I think most people are assuming we’ll have the ability to fend off anything. All it’s going to take is Zuck creating a new fediverse-enabled platform and just giving everyone with an Instagram account access using their already existing accounts. We’ll be outnumbered by the millions.
We don’t need to become more successful than Meta in order to fend him off, so to speak. We merely need to still be here, and independent.
This is a big part of the shift in mentality that needs to happen. Something doesn’t have to be the biggest to be better. We don’t need millions of concurrent users per server to enjoy connecting with other people and sharing ideas and art.
Like, a local cafe doesn’t need to beat the profit margins of a Starbucks, it just needs to make ends meet. And it’s probably a lot better experience in the process.
Realistically every instance can monetize in whatever way they see fit but I highly doubt this’ll be a thing. Mastodon is way bigger and more expensive than Lemmy and it runs just fine through donations. No reason why the same won’t work here.
Lemmy itself is also likely to follow in Mastodon’s path by getting money from sponsorships and fundraisers. See https://www.investopedia.com/how-mastodon-makes-money-7482865
Sponsors want something in return though, surely?
Just a shoutout on the main website or github. Not much else, they tip in to support the project.
This might work for now, but I’m skeptical how well this would work in the long run. Do those company pay a monthly fee to be there? What happens when there’s a hundred companies on that list? What happens if a company pays a substantial amount to be there and threatens to stop paying if xyz doesn’t happen?
- Just like there’s Lemmy and Kbin that powers the “threadiverse” / reddit-like portion of the fediverse, Mastodon is only one software that enables micro-blogging like experiences. There’s Pleroma, Misskey and many more. And of course there’s always the possibility for more to be developed over time.
- Of Mastodon there’s likely hundreds of so-called “forks” out there. Since it is open source, people can take that source code, and host their own version of the project. This means they can make their own changes, include changes by others, remove features they don’t like, and so on.
- Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them. Large parts of the project are contributed by volunteers, which can jump ship to another implementation as soon as they feel like the one they’ve contributed to is not acting in the interest of users.
- Admins which actually host Mastodon instances get to decide when to update to a newer version, or whether they want to use a fork that includes the features they like (which the “official” Mastodon project has not (yet) included) or anti-features that might’ve been put there due to pressure from outside (possible but less likely).
The power here is in the hands of users and admins. We just have to be careful not to let a company like Google or Facebook/Meta take control over a substantial portion of the fediverse. See also: How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse)
I do agree with most of your points, except for one.
Mastodon is not just run by a handful of people owned by a corporation, forced to work for them.
Yes, for now. What happens when it requires so much administration and development that someone needs to manage it? Eventually, it will get big enough that its required to be a company. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
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I’m just aware how many projects have come in promising to be the underdog who does things differently only to end up running into the exact same challenges and making the exact same decisions as all the others
Yes and Mastodon itself is a registered non-profit organization. There’s a few people they’re able to pay to work on the projects, thanks to sponsors and donations. But there’s a lot more contributors (over 800). I think the people doing valuable work on FOSS projects have a lot of opportunity to work elsewhere if they feel like they’re being made to do things antithetical to their values. Not to mention the amount of noise they could make to expose the project and its shady goals, if that were the case. Things do work differently for FOSS projects than your average for-profit investor-driven project.
For many people, myself included, paying $10 a month for some VC schmuck to buy another pina coloda while he’s resting on the beach smoking a Cuban cigar laughing about how much money he made from exploitation is a no-way. On the contrary, paying $10 once every few months to cover hosting costs for a service we all enjoy using and is not misusing our funds is something a lot are happy to do.
When I purchase something or subscribe to a service (the only subscription services I have are servers I rent sooo…) I think twice about whether I wanna spend this money because I can find a loophole around it, donating to keep my instance alive is something I’m ready to do.
And that’s really the only sustainable way things like this can exist. The Internet has been having it’s free lunch for so long we’ve forgotten how to buy our own.
I’d say it’s more that we’ve been paying out the nose in the form of offering up our data and digital autonomy, and by allowing not only the Internet but our societies at large to degrade and polarize. We’ve paid dearly for our ‘free’ services, in the case of the US with everything from our reproductive rights to our connections with our own families and communities.
I’d much rather pay the price of an extra latte now and then for real internet communities than deal with actual Nazis and orbital Teslas for some shitty undermoderated ad feeds infested with trolls, AI, and literal societal saboteurs on the payrolls of Putin and Winnie the Pooh.
Good to know!
How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.
In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn’t stop people from building things or growing things for fun.
I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.
All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….
And some sites could be completely free.
The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.
Is that unreasonable?
There will probably eventually be some commercial Lemmy sites. I honestly think it would be awesome if large game studios, and software companies, and anyone else who has need for a forum, made their own federated Lemmy instances as their official support forums.
I can definitely picture a lemmy.bethesda.net or whatever else
Man I’d never considered anything like that, but being able to see activity across multiple official forums at the same time. That’d be amazing
That’s a really great idea. Makes a lot more sense than relying on official accounts on 3rd party platforms like Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook.
Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They’re not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.
Give it 15 years.
I’ve been online since 1990; 10-15 years seems to be the maximum time a community can live without shitting itself over greed or something new and better coming along to scoop up users.
That said, things like Usenet and IRC still technically exist… They’re just niche now. The way this shit works is more like those, so it will likely never fully disappear.
To be fair, there is a line between greed and monetization. Monetization can be simply to fund servers costs and labor. Especially as the community grows, it’s just going to get more and more expensive. I think a donation page or a toggle-able ads option (off by default) would be great ways for users to support the site to fund the costs without it being greedy. Both options could give some sort of donor badge as a thank you, because there’s no features involved with it so people don’t feel forced to donate/support.
I think the key really is transparency. I’m not going to throw money into a black hole and hope it does some good, but if there is some level of transparency showing running costs plus deficit/surplus towards those costs then I wouldn’t mind contributing.
Or, for the time being, this platform never takes off and reddit’s moat temporarily prevails. Eventually Reddit will die, but no one can predict when.
It will be interesting to see to what level the server traffic changes in Reddit. I was looking at a post last night (for was still kinda working if you weren’t logged in) and it was a lot of confused people wondering what all the fuss was about, very few people ppl against reddits actions, and it clicked, the majority of people against spez had just left once the apps stopped working.
I checked the user history of those defending Reddit, all very young accounts so I guess ppl who joined recently and only know the Reddit app are left, but the older users… Gone.
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What is this email you speak of? Is it popular? Surely it can’t be that popular if it’s a decentralized open protocol and standard.
Idk what it is, but I might look into it. My pigeon is getting pretty old
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In a quest to kill spam, email has become somewhat unhealthy and centralized. Setting up a new email provider is a lot more difficult today than it was years ago. Sending a message to the established providers from a new provider will often end up in spam.
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This is true but if you were to do that most people would simply not receive your emails. The fight against spam has effectively turned email into an oligopoly.
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I was replying to the part where you said that “You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards”. While I agree that this is technically possible, it has become increasingly difficult (see this blog post for example).
You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
You can, but as I said, because you aren’t a know provider every message from your server will end up in the spam folder of everyone using Gmail.
You won’t have a functional system unless you back it with either Gmail or Outlook.
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It’s interesting to hear your take as someone experienced, because on hobbyist forums like /r/selfhosted I used to hear the complaint above all the time. Maybe people aren’t doing things correctly. I’ve never messed with my own email server and have no dog in this fight, but I’ve definitely heard that complaint a ton.
LeMail 😁
