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.
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.
What’s the background on this?
deleted by creator
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.
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.
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.
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 already are sites with Patreons set up for them, right? Not that you get anything out of being a member (i think). Having a Patreon (or similar) available seems like a good way to support an instance to me.
Agreed. But I wouldn’t say you get nothing out of being a member on Patreon. I run lemmy.ninja. If I had a paying customer (Patreon) ask for something, and I had a non paying user ask for something…
Who do you suppose gets my time first? Now, it may be that I have to tell the paying customer that what they are asking for is only possible if code is changed. In that case I can put a request in on their behalf. However if it is a thing I CAN do, then my time goes to them first, right?
As long as we don’t allow capitalist corporate greed to ruin the Fediverse like it has ruined (and will continue to ruin) practically everything.
Did you know that you can move to North Korea and enjoy life without capitalism and greed?
This basically
“I don’t actually like pizza”
“Yeah well you could just eat horseshit instead”
This is a dumb comment
Why did you leave it then?
Did you know you’re commenting on a site that was created specifically because people don’t like capitalism and greed?
How’s that relevant?
Context. Did you forget what you wrote?
And just to add to my previous reply - creation of Lemmy IS an act of capitalism! The author of Lemmy decided he didn’t like Reddit. So he made the most capitalist decision in their life - to create a competition. Lemmy is an actual flagship of capitalism and free market: when even people who dislike capitalism turn to capitalist tools to improve their lives.
I’m sorry, but Lemmy would not exist without capitalism. And you won’t be typing angry comments on your phone in the loo without it. You would, most likely, work in some mines right now and a slice of bread for lunch would be your best achievement in life.
Wow, news flash, you must participate in capitalism while living in a capitalist society. Though I fail to see how creating a free open-source distributed alternative could be construed as a “capitalist” move. Maybe look into the lemmy developers and their personal politics before assigning motivations to their actions.
IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it’s bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don’t mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we’ll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become
I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I’m sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can’t
Even with these servers being paid for that’s kind of rough. It’s very hard to decentralize something reliable with solid data retention without paying.
Don’t even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it…
If Lemmy in general grows to the user base of reddit, infrastructure costs(if it was optimized via scale) would be in the tens of millions/year. Given that it’s a hogepoge of mixed providers using expensive AF hosting probably hundreds of millions.
Account one day old with the first comment being about how the Fediverse is fundamentally flawed and wrought with risk. Further general fear mongering and lack of understanding how the technology works.
Found the Reddit marketing team. Please be sure to pass on to spez our most sinsere get fucked sentiment.
Instead of having a technical and factual discussion about it, let’s instead attack people!
No one here needs your flavor of toxicity…
If you can’t attack the argument or idea, attacking the person to rub your ego is a pretty toxic and nonproductive thing to do.
It’s your choice to be offended and to respond aggressively instead of treating it as a discussion on how we can improve the platform, what deficiencies are concerning, and how those will affect the users and instance owners.
I don’t think this comment is correct.
‘The fediverse’ is several pieces of open source software that interface with each other, and they can be hosted on distributed computing / cloud services as much as any other service. Its up to the instance runner.
Lots of other problems with your comment, such as assuming enterprises are more efficient than motivated individuals.
Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it’s been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.
If lemmy.world ever sold out, I’d probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.
Especially how Lemmy is right now, only a small portion of users would be needed to sustainable keep an instance running. Maybe from every 1.000 users, only 1 would be willing to pay 10$ a month and it should be more than enough.
Shit changes quickly when somebody thinks it would be a good way to start allowing video-uploads. It can get expensive fast with that amount of storage and bandwidth needed. I can see instances selling small “premium” subscriptions for videouploads. You could still host your own instance and get videouploads completely free for yourself, but if you don’t wanna go that route, it would make sense (and would be totally fair)
It probably will be, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no lock in, so no admin can hold you hostage with their policies.
Some people may monitize by having paid for subscriptions, like email.
Others will offer free services with banner ads on their site, like email.
Others will offer the service as a way to drive traffic and adoption of other services they offer, like email.
Others will run them at their own cost because they want to, like email.
Companies will run their own instances, like email.
Notice a trend here. For all of you who think the Fediverse is doomed because “ermegurd not platform, is gonna fail”. Umm, email?
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
LeMail 😁
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.
Email has not become centralised at all. You have a clear misunderstanding of what that means in the context technological services.
A centralised service is one provided by a sole or group of providers who decide who and who cannot provide said service.
Email in no way fits that description. You can spin up your own email server tomorrow and start communicating with the world through the email protocol standards.
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.
I have spun up a lot of email servers over the past few years for clients and not had the issue you speak off. Perhaps you need to look either at your implementation or maybe that you are doing it on a VPS provider with a shit record?
I have brand new domains with on-prem email servers spinning up constantly and do not have the issue you described.
If you are using hosted servers then perhaps you need to dump the host.
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.
I don’t understand why you think this is the case, assuming you don’t run your own servers?
Apart from being a conspiratorial person, how can I spin up servers on new domains constantly and not have this problem?
I am not talking about creating new email accounts or using a shady VPS.
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).
Because there will always be rebels running small to medium size instances based off of donations. It was the very first thing to happen at the birth of the internet, and will continue to happen today. Will there be a few major instances that eat up the majority of the fedi? Yeah, probably, but the design of the fedi is that the experience of decentralized social media will stay the same regardless of what’s going on with instances of the network.
There’s word that Eugene has plans to integrate some monetization features into Mastodon after the meeting with Facebook.
People could monetize individual instances. They can’t monetize the whole thing because its open source software.
I’m kind of shocked how many young kids don’t get this.
It is okey not to understand it. Don’t be rude. You were also not born with knowledge of the principles of free software and fediverse.
Yeah its more that I assumed each generation would get naturally better at tech, but its more like cars where the first generation knows how to fix them and subsequent ones don’t, because the cars get so good that you don’t need to
There’s some truth to that. The computers I was first exposed to costs thousands of dollars and all you got was a text console with a prompt. You had to figure out how to make the magic box so something meaningful.
Now a Raspberry Pi computer with 1000x more compute power, memory plus network connectivity costs $6. The equivalent of the computers I originally learned to program on is now basically a disposable commodity.
I really wish those 6$ raspies were easily accessible though.
Your point still stands, it wasn’t easy getting a tower in the olden days either.I just bought a few at adafruit. I didn’t realize they were in short supply now.
I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.
The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.
Everybody has to learn everything some time.
Shockingly- I’ve heard from a few of my teacher friends that the upcoming generation isn’t that computer savvy. (EDIT- “traditional” computers that is).
We’re starting to see the “tablet kids” grow up. They were raised with iPads and iPhones. And they didn’t have to deal with figuring out how to “deal with the inner workings” to download a bunch of computer programs. Their typing skills are apparently not that great as well for the same reason.
This is the consequence of so many years of idiot-proofing things. While not necessarily a bad thing most of the time, having shit that “just works” absolutely ruins troubleshooting skills. I see it all the time with my nieces and nephews.
Can confirm. I’ve heard the exact same thing from several teacher friends as well.
I confidently told my retired parents that I thought we were approaching a world where self-hosting and open source would be far more common, I’m disappointed that it sounds as if I overestimated computer literacy in the new generation :(
Surprised no one else mentioned this… the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.
There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.
Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances…
To answer the second question… I don’t know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I’m aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.
I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can’t imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.
I may be a minority. But I would gladly join a server that is paid and I get stability, but also a better stronger fight against the inevitable onslaught of shit - in return.
Don’t even mention how risky it is having various people running the servers themselves.
Security? Backups? Due diligence? Ability to pay? Awol?
All different person to person.
Idk a good solution, but the fediverse has big problems to solve. One of which is that instances are single servers, there is no distributed compute model, which means they crumple under load and can only scale so far. Not to mention the unsustainable costs that start coming with it…
