How are we going to pay for all this?

As paradoxical as it is, I think that these open source non-profit projects are a lot more efficient than profit-driven, debt-fueled corporations.

First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.

Secondly, they don't have the infinite growth mindset that pushes enterpreneurs to to spend as much as possible for maximum growth, all financed by a growing amount of investors (and debt, which costs interest fees).

If a FOSS project reaches maximum capacity, they will close subscriptions, they will throttle traffic, i.e. they will slow down growth, but they will not go into debt. Slowing down growth is something that a for-profit company would never do (at least until the interest rates were low and the investors were plenty, today idk). Eventually someone else in the community will decide to do a generous donation or open their own instance.

Imo that the private sector has the label of efficient is something only themselves have pushed and subsequently stuck as common knowledge. As far as I can see, the private sector is equally ridden with inefficiency.
First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.

This becomes more clear when you call it the Free Software movement instead of Open Source. It's a movement that focuses on user freedom and that's why it was created. Open Source doesn't share the same values.
Very well put
I don't get it. Why would you call that more efficient? In your example a profit driven company will grow at a higher rate than a FOSS project right ? So in what way is it more efficient?
- Yeah your issue is youre looking it from the perspective of a cancer cell. Growth isnt always good. Too much growth and you run out of resources. Keeping things sustainable and self sufficient and not reliant on loans and “infinite growth” ponzi economics tends to work better in the long run. (Example: libraries)
- i think they mean efficient in terms of resource usage, not growth.
- Honestly I thought they meant resource efficient, cause we don't need to track the users every swipe (plus another million fingerprinting methods), which saves a heck load of clocks. There's also almost no per user saved data minus the most basic subscriptions, so everything just runs better

By not all ending up on the same server.

Could we create an onboarding system that randomly picks an instance for each new user? It is not too important which instance a user joins due to federation, right?
- The instance a user joins is quite important. An instance that doesn't want to store images and video will not want users who subscribe to all the image/video communities (that will federate their content over). A user whose interests are overwhelmingly technical won't be interested in local communities on an artist server, where a non-technical user might feel at home. Many instance moderation policies are friendly to right-wing and will be defederated by mainstream instances. And then there are loli/shota/koda instances...

It's certainly a challenge. I run three instances on the #fediverse. Two small ones and a larger one with 450 users. I have a donation page; initially people were enthusiastic and I covered costs. Now, I have regular monthly donators but not enough to cover costs so I am subsidising it. I took the decision when I launched that it could happen and it's my problem.

I think there will be many instances will fall away in the coming months due to costs. Especially if you are thousands of users and associated costs.

We need to come up with a new funding model, where people appreciate you get nothing for nothing. All the large corporates sell your data as advertising for revenue. The greater public do not appreciate they are selling their soul.

Is there an approximate specs per number of users guide to size a lemmy instance?
- I haven't seen one yet. Disk usage this morning on lemmy.world was reported at about 4GB over 11 days (probably low usage). The 100GB drive would probably fill up in 275 days or so if usage did not increment. If it's not redundant and dies, all that content is lost.
  
  So storage will be a huge issue for lemmy unless I'm missing something.
- Yeah, I'd love to get an approximate sense of how much these instances cost

As everyone else has already said that's a very good question, one that doesn't necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I'd point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn't unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we've had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster's expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like "federated" instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone's data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn't abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I'd guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren't people donating to open source projects... and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

Do you happen to know what service that's with? Trying to see what resources that takes. ($25-$30 can mean very different specs depending on where it is hosted). Ty.
- Dunno. Hey @smorks@smorks@lemmy.ca , what is lemmy.ca's host provider/plan (unless its top secret Canadian Moose Power Secrets)?

I suspect reddit's reported uprofitablity isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.

I read they have 2000 staff members, why so many? The moderation is done by volunteers, just seems excessive.
- why so many?
  
  Engineers to develop chat and new ad features.
  Sales & customer support (for advertisers, not users).
  PR & media relations.
  Executive junket planning & goat molestation.
  
  ... yeah, no idea.
  
  Somehow not fixing the underscore bug that breaks most links to Wikipedia.
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We don't even know for a fact if they are truly unprofitable or not, it's not like anyone here has reviewed their books.
- No, but it would be extra stupid for Spez to say that if it weren't true because it could affect investments and draw legal action.
Back in the day, Reddit used to show how much of their server costs were being covered by Reddit gold revenue alone. It was basically always enough to cover daily usage.
Their hosting costs also rose exponentially when they decided to host their own videos and pictures.
- Which they could have locked behind Reddit Gold or some pay-tier. /shrug

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they'll give up because the bigger instances are closed. Someone's gotta pay for it, and it's going to cost more than a Netflix subscription. Servers aren't cheap.

This also ignores that the system isn't horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive
- I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.
  
  (This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don't think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.
  
  This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive
  
  Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don't understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:

a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!

Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.

This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.

I'm alright with centralisation personally, as long as it's easy enough to move off of. If Lemmy or Kbin or whatever starts being evil, you could always branch off your own organisation and still have the same content fairly seamlessly through federation. (And yes, planning to remove federation counts as evil and hopefully would cause an exodus beforehand)
The good thing is: Free development can an does happen (see Linux!). Hosting seems to be the main issue. An ideal solution would be each instance having a capacity limiter, which automatically redirects a % of content to other instances if it becomes to much. Is this possible?
- That's a bit complicated. Account handling is by nature of federation, linked to your source instance. There is discussion on GitHub about moving account export up the chain just to help people move from lemmy.ml to other instances.
  
  Keep that discussion pinned and if you want you can see if you can help with a PR if you're able.
a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations

Can you elaborate? I have the impression, that we need to think more deeply about how the donations should be distributed. E.g. a users fund are donated proportional to their subscribed Communities? I think it's difficult, as people's time spent on a community doesn't necessarily mean it's proportionally valuable. I've had a few subreddits which I used rarely but we're quite important to me.
- Each instance is free to field their own donation drives for their running cost. They even can display advertisements if they feel like it. There is no "one size fits all" here, and there shouldn't.
  
  Each instance is potentially in a different jurisdiction, making it hard to transfer money, etc.
  
  Not only that, but I think having funds centrally collected and then distributed is a particularly bad idea. It comes with too much opportunities for bad blood. Money and friendship don't mix.
  
  The only unifying constant of the network is the software that runs it. This though needs to be improved in various areas, for which centrally collected funds would be ideal, as every instance will benefit from it. No operator of any instance would have a disadvantage from advertising the central donation drive. They would benefit from it by having better software in the end.
Maybe they could place some sort of incentive for donations? My instant not-seriously-scrutinized thought would be to give perhaps some sort of badge or distinction if you make a donation and maybe another sort of distinction for the top 3 donators although I'm not thinking about any possible consequences such a system might have.
- Yeah, badges of distinction are one of the reddit things that Lemmy is trying to get away from.
  
  This system is closer to old message boards than Reddit.
  
  What the hexbear instance has done is include a donation tally in the footer and occasionally promote featured posts calling for donations when they're needed.

Reddit has over 2,000 employees most of whom are doing bullshit nobody using the site actually needs or wants, it's possible to run a lot leaner than that. Like Reddit itself used to, before they started burning hundreds of millions trying to compete with every other social media site at once instead of being Reddit

bullshit nobody using the site actually needs or wants

Like being CEO.

Don't forget to make a donation to your instance if you love it. For most of us it's a bit early but I give my 10 EUR per year to my Mastodon admin. Also, if you can choose instance ran by a non profit rather than a person as it ease the whole donation mechanism and give you the right to check where your membership due go.

Is there a list of non-profits that run an instance?
- So far the only one I know of is the Mastodon server Mozilla.social.

In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we'll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit's costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

I think the biggest cost will be image/video storage. The text takes very little space in today's standards. The good thing is that symmetric fibre internet connections are becoming more common so it may be possible for members of the instance to contribute unused disk space to help with its image/video storage. This plus limiting the image/video sizes (and maybe forbidding video uploads altogether) will allow the instances to scale with user count.

this works on the same principals as fidonet, UseNet, email, etc. These protocols are more like fundamental services. The idea behind these was that instead of running a bunch if proprietary garbage you would run things that support A LOT of standard protocols. Why? Because NO ONE should be allowed to own our communications but ourselves.

The corps did not build these networks, we did. Software will improve over time, OSS shows the way.

Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It's not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.

With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn't. Meaning there's fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn't succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.

Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.

A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
- It doesn't have to be that complicated. Your server's admin ask for money, setup a method to receive donations (ex: Liberapay, Paypal, etc) and there you go.
  
  If you raise more than you need, the community can vote to donate it to other communities in need, to the Lemmy or Kbin devs or to some charity.
- It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.
- Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
  
  when you donate money, you're not funding wikipedia's operating costs. wikipedia itself is self sufficient. what you're funding instead is the wikimedia foundation- which is set up to not receive grants but to give them.
  
  the drives are misleading, to say the least
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
- Then you need a new account I think. It's a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol I think (but I haven't done any reading). Your identity is tied to the instance it was created on.
- As someone who burned reddit accts regularly this doesn't really concern me. But if it really worries you couldn't you set up your own private instance with you as the sole user? Nothing is more reliable than yourself. Even corporations with millions of dollars can close up shop at a moments notice.

That's why I'm running my own server. Mastodon is much bigger than Lemmy and it does fine with community run servers.

Yeah technical users and people who are friends with technical users can just use a micro instance.
Yep, I'm using lemmy.world mostly as a trial period, but I plan on getting on my own instance to help reduce the load on the community any way I can. Will probably get a few friends on it as well.

The distributed nature of Lemmy should make things more manageable. Personally, I'm running an instance on a dedicated machine I already pay for, so it's not costing me anything unless storage skyrockets. Many other instance hosts are also hobbyists that don't mind covering the costs, and may take some form of donations locally on their sidebars.

There probably should be a built-in feature for instance admins to enable a local donation button to contribute to their costs, though. While Lemmy is fairly resource-efficient, larger instances are eventually going to require pretty beefy VMs to keep up with the traffic, image uploads, etc.

In general, Fedi admins simply close registrations when they can't keep up with an influx of new users, and point people to other, smaller instances
- Closing registrations is all well and good, but can't activity / load still skyrocket as users from federated instances subscribe to, comment on, and post to their communities?
Can I ask about the server load? I have a Plex server sitting around doing mostly nothing. I don't want to compromise that experience, but I've been thinking about starting an instance.
I was thinking about setting up a Pi to host a small/personal Lemmy instance, do you think that's a reasonable plan? I have no clue how resource intensive Lemmy is. Was thinking it could be nice to store my and friends' personal data on our own server instead of some random remote server (to some extent obvi).
- Yes it should run perfectly fine on a Pi, at least for a small instance. You will need to get ports forwarded or setup a reverse proxy if hosting at home, since you'll need to generate a valid SSL cert (i.e. Letsencrypt) to be able to connect to the federation
This is pretty much my exact same situation as well, plus I get so few opportunities to "pay it forward" so to speak, and now is finally my chance to do so.

Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.

Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.

It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.

That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.

Yeah exactly. If my instance stickies a post asking for donations, I'd throw them a couple bucks. No doubt

You bring up a very good point. Currently lemmy.ml has thousands of users. Lemmy.world has thousands of users. The hardware they have selected to run their instances is adequate for now, but, what is the plan for scaling out if the user base grows? Is there one? They have a donation page on each lemmy instance (click or tap the heart icon,) but that can’t be enough to pay for the cost of running something used by millions of people, even if only 100s of thousands are ever only online at any given time.

I’m terms of UI/UX, @dessalines@lemmy.ml has mentioned in a post they are currently working on major performance improvements and enhancements.

It is an old programming trope that premature optimization is a waste of time. As Lemmy scales, several bottlenecks will be hit. Some might be predictable, but many will only become evident after crossing a specific threshold. There are a lot of guides for scaling Mastodon servers after hitting certain bottlenecks, but this is all uncharted territory for Lemmy and we're going to find out the fun way.
- Real devs do it in prod!
  
  I’m seriously tempted to write some performance tests in jmeter, locust, or k6, and fire up some live traffic simulations / simulated load against my lemmy instance to see what happens. But at the same time that would feel too much like work and I don’t want to work over the weekend.
Ideally, I think no one instance should have a million users to begin with.
- User caps might be a good way to decentralize and ensure that we don't end up with just a few mega-instances. If there were a page showing available instances with percent of max users then people could use that when selecting.
- Ideally, yes. If that can be the reality, and I suppose that is how it should would with federation, then server costs should never get out of hand.

I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don't wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.

We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance

Speaking as someone who totally doesn't understand federation (but totally does get servers being overloaded) - I can completely see why they all joined what appears to be the primary instance. I did. I really struggled to work out which server to join and had to wade through a few that had their own special rules (eg "no creating communities here" - idr which one that was tho).

I ended up joining lemm.ee simply because it seems like a nice generic server set up to do general stuff with that wasn't lemmy.ml. Is that a good choice? idk.

I had a similar problem grasping mastodon (actually the reason I didn't really use it in the end).

Lemmy servers need to work more like Counterstrike or TF2 or WoW servers (edit: or IRC servers - that's probably a better comparison tbh), where you might want to join a specific server with its own personality, but most people probably don't care and are more interested in whether it performs well and is likely to be around a while. I also think some simple things like making the server less prominent in the UI and not making local communities the default view would help loads with people not feeling like they're less because they're not on the primary instance.

Edit: LMAO except I didn't. I posted using the account I'd made on lemmy.ml but decided not to use. Lemmying is hard, yo.
My local timeline is literally the whole reason I joined this particular instance. There isn't enough traffic in the niche subs, so I find a popular instance with posts that tend towards my interests, instead.
- @if_you_can_keep_it @Rogueren Assuming that one Federated Service is the end all be all user experience for what you’d like to share can hurt many. In Mastodon I kept seeing people (during the Twitter Exodus) who wanted multi-sever posting to each local feed under one account. Like Lemmy’s cross site posts, not sure if Lemmy lets you cross post multiple times to different communities. But some basically wanted Mastodon to work like Lemmy and FB Groups.
  
  e.g. Main Post -> Community 1, Community 2

I signed up for the lemmy.ml Patreon and am happy to support an open, federated site like this. I'd never pay for Reddit Gold, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, or any of those other nasty pay-to-win commericalized things but I'll pay to keep an open platform from implementing stupid "premium" bullshit.

I just signed up for the Lemmy.ml patreon. I wish they had a $5 per month option, but I can just not skip ordering doordash one extra time and help pay for this instance. I use the hell out of it so it's the least I can do.

The cost will be spread out, and people can monetize how they see fit. I'm wondering if there will be additional benefits you can add to your instance for a charge that people might be willing to pay.

I'm considering offering an Element server and maybe email on mine with a shared username for each service. That's going to take time to setup, though.

We must prove that it's valued and let the monetization come later. I'm working on this in my spare time. Once I can grow, maybe I can put more effort into it. I think it'll be a lot of people like me for a while financing it out of pocket.

Donating $20 a month over here, hope it helps

Personally I plan on donating the price of Reddit Premium to my instance owner

Whenever he figures out donations that is :))

I don't know what kinda person happens to have a massive server cluster sitting around waiting to go, but @TheDude is the dude, and the dude abides.
- Hello fellow sh.it user! Yeah, TheDude is amazing and the server hardware stats are absolutely insane (considering it’s all hosted by a guy who does it as an hobby). Kudos to him and I’m proud to be part of this home instance.
- Seriously, from what I've been seeing, that guy is my savior

Since it's distributed, the cost doesn't even compare to a centralized instance. It's really hard to say how much it would cost to host everyone across the fediverse, but because of decentralization, it'll be a hell of a lot easier to achieve.

ActivityPub consumes a lot of resources, so the cost for each instance owner will still be high
- It's not a problem on mastodon, really, so, I don't see why it would be here!

The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.

So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.

Apropos of nothing, where are you finding domains for $10/year?
- Check tld-list.com for price comparisons of different domain providers.
- I was able to get a .win domain for $4.16 yearly on cloudflare. Cloudflare seems to have some pretty cheap domains.
- I mean inflation might have hit them a little bit but dot coms have always been around $10 in my mind. Other TLDs can vary but you can get good deals through promotions sometimes.
  
  Were only talking about the address here.

Each instance funds itself. Some might try ads, but as of now, most are just funded by donations.

I'd love hosting a chunk on my anyways online Linux box (and if it was easy I could put up another junk box or two (like i3-i5 8GB 256GB-512GB/1-4TB) if it fits on a 1Gb ethernet line, but I admit I don't have the time (/energy) for all the stuff around (I'd do backups) especially if the hardware breaks or there are troll infestations etc.

Before the whole world migrates to Lemmy, maybe we could hold on by teaming up in some way.

Maybe my shard should be about doing just that, and hopefully people wanting to set up 'lemmys' could gather and share experiences and help.

Thoughts?

I've thought about contributing to lemmy because a built in decentralized hosting/backup solution would be ideal. Add in some heavy sandboxing and the more advanced users could donate their hardware usage to their favourite instance (ideally with ease) - then the load could even be broken up per instance, and it'd pretty much gaurentee the info will never be lost to time because anyone can host a backup

@psylancer If you got 100 million users so that it's costing 400 million dollars a year, then ideally you need one million servers with 100 users on each. They need to all pass around a hat between their 100 users to raise the 50 dollars in server costs a month.

Seems like storage is the cost prohibitive part. Search is going to be difficult, too. I wonder whether the model there might be community supported shared services. A bunch of instances could jointly run an elasticsearch cluster or Algolia instance and charge for API access to cover costs.
- I wonder if the storage costs could be reduced, over the long term anyway, by having a setting to automatically delete anything older than a certain amount of time, configurable by the owners of a given instance. So an instance with ample funding or good hardware could disable it, and one that has enough drive space for about 3 years worth of posts could set that length of time for how long something lasts. Probably also would want a way for an instance admin to mark a posts as permanent and exempt from deletion. Would be a shame to lose that older content, but if reddit is any indication, anything people want to see again will likely get reposted anyway, and it would be preferable to losing an instance to rising storage costs. I imagine it might also make search a little better by having less to look through, though tbh I'm not sure how search algorithms work so I don't know how much that would help them if at all.

I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.

I’m running my own instance, so I’m doing my part!
- <insert Starship Troopers meme here> *

I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don't really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn't just a social media, it's a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.

Yup. On Facebook/Twitter the product isn't the content, its a whole shitload of agregated personal data of the users and advertisements that use said data to target the users, so its only natural that these companies would be spending ludicrous amounts of money finding new ways to collect and parse that data.

Are ads forbidden?

not forbidden, just difficult to make work. you'd have to create a fork of Lemmy with support for ads, and you'd have to convince people to come to your instance when there are so many ad-free instances out there
- As we've already seen, there remains a pretty strong impulse for users to centralize on a single instance (as evidenced by lemmy.ml and mastodon.social). Ads can be wielded as a way to drive users to less burdened instances while also serving to help mitigate operating costs -- it's actually a rather elegant solution when you think about it from a problem-solving perspective rather than a profit-making one!
- People who hate ads.
  
  So good luck.

I would like to join a cooperatively owned instance.

I have been tempted to join cosocial.ca, however I don't care for microblogging (Mastodon) as much as something forum-like such as a Lemmy instance.

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Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit's whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They're not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn't even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn't scale linearly, there's only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn't possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn't make sense either.

They're probably the sorts of people that would drive down the quality of content here, so no great loss anyway.

I'm running a barebones server for myself and a few communities (not many subs yet) which will run for less than a Starbucks coffee a month... (Assuming I don't need more storage space... Lemmy seems pretty light. The main servers are gonna carry the load unfortunately... Beehaw.org had a transparency post about financials as of about a week ago they said something that their instance was costing like 50-75ish a month of I recall.

donations to my favorite instances, like wikipedia i hope :)

Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.

There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.___

Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
- I don't host any instances myself, but I have experience with web hosting in general. Yes, the hardware will need to scale vertically with more activity, but I don't know what lemmy's anticipated load thresholds are.
  
  I would guess a decent i7 with an SSD and 16GB+ RAM would handle lemmy quite comfortably for a good while. So the expense isn't entirely trivial, but it's nothing compared to a centralized service with hundreds of millions of regular users.
- HW gets cheaper. And prolly in big group will be some ppl who can donate. And we are going to experience burst of bots. One way how to fight them is pay little for posting. Or maybe we shutdown internet BCS of CO2. Everyone need to decide if they wanna pay with money or data, there is no free lunch.
Hell, I'm already practically wasting a few domains already as is. Maybe some day I'll set up a subdomain with my own instance.

I bought a server for about 100 a year... With my whopping 2 users... It's overkill... So... My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno

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Donate to the devs!

https://lemmy.ml/post/1175822

It's literally all donated

Really nice merch, with small logos on. Think how the LTT stealth stuff is.

I know some people love merch but I've never really seen the appeal. If I want to support something I like I would rather purchase their media (artist) or donate directly if they have that option.

I do agree though if there is merch, I would vote for smaller logos.
- I've never really seen the appeal.
  
  Wearing t-shirts has helped me to meet folks with similar interests in real life. Critical Role, Onewheel, mountain bike brand merch, etc. I could see striking up a conversation with someone wearing a Lemmy logo, if one exists.
- Just another form of revenue. The more revenue streams, the better. Merch is good because it means people get something physical back for their money.

Given that lemmy is an OSS project and decentralized, it draws a lot of people with knowledge and resources. You could easily host your own instance for your friends, to have them connect to other instances. And i think there are enough people in these communities that have some left over server resources to host their own instances.

I got an old server from work sitting around at home doing nothing. Seriously thinking about hosting my own instance on it

By not asking the same question every single day.

sell checkmarks like Tumbler.

for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.

What would the checkmark mean?
- Just that you support the lemmy community.

I run a website that I pay for out of pocket. It's not super expensive and it's a hobby of mine, so I don't really mind.

The infrastructure I pay for wouldn't be able to handle thousands of users simultaneously, but it could easily handle a few dozen or a couple hundred people simultaneously.

I'm considering setting up a kbin/lemmy instance specifically for my niche interest (fencing). Across the English speaking internet, there isn't that large a regular online community, and I think the infrastructure would be affordable for one person out-of-pocket, as a hobby - maybe with a few donations once a year.

If every small community had someone doing something like this, it would basically self-solve

We ask u/spez for the money ...

Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much "gold" was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.

We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.

This is a great idea.

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@cwagner @psylancer Also the fediverse in general having easier ways to self-host at home or on a VPS, which helps distribute costs/storage/bandwidth.
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edit: misposted comment - see bizarre explanation below (and it's not just me)

westworld - lovely visuals
alias - excellent theme music
bojack horseman

What lol
- Lost lemming
- I composed that comment in another thread, tabbed away, and when I tabbed back the pending comment was pasted into this thread that I wasn't even reading. Hit POST before I noticed it. 2nd time that's happened this morning.
Unfortunately they’re all copyrighted so won’t work for income.

There already is a question similar to this. You can find lots of ideas there :)

I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.

Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.

Sounds good as long as it doesn't provide an incentive to pay for posts or comments to rise to visibility because then there'll just be advertising everywhere
- Yes I agree.
  
  One alternative is something similar to awards on reddit. However one could argue that it would impact the visibility of awarded posts by making them more 'eye-catching'. The only way such a system would not impact post/comment visibility is if it is a private transfer of value.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that's what keeps the lights on then I'll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I'm skeptical that will work.
Why would it have to be blockchain? Plus like the other commenter said, that provides incentive to bot comments and such. Donation based stuff works fine.
- Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.
  
  Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.
  
  I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia's notorious pity-ware ad banners.
  
  Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.

IMO it sounds like that some AI corporation should host their own instance(s). They only pay for server and maintenance costs, while community does the rest and they have their data.

Would be best of both worlds, isn't it? Once they become greedy, we are f*cked again, just like Reddit did...

You can say fuck on the Internet

ads and trackers. people worry about privacy like they r handling CIA data and all they have on their phones is videos of cats and golden retrievers

Your phone probably also has your name, address, your sin number that you've written down so you can transcribe it later into that government form and then forgot to delete, your mom sending you unsolicited advice on how to deal with your hemorrhoid which she was never supposed to know about, search history of looking up how to deal with said hemeroids, furry porn wait no those are also cat videos, that embarrassing conversation you had with your crush five years ago. There's so much that could be on your phone that most people wouldn't want strangers getting ahold of.

Bank accounts and escrow and payment processors are complicated and require real companies with tax identifiers. Nobody is gonna set that up just to host an instance. IMO this is a perfect use case for crypto. Could be a monthly thing or micropayments. Maybe something a bit like the Basic Attention Token.

It's a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we're looking at covering operating costs.

Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn't seem like a great fit for the primary.