this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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For those that are saying "no" because it's Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
Let me be specific: I am not asking if you donate or contribute to any server. I am asking if you'd sign up to a social network that required payment from every user as a measure to avoid spammers and to keep the service running.
No. Not today at any rate. I probably would have supported a subscription for Reddit 5-8 years ago. The community and content was better. Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon hasn’t caught up to that level yet so I don’t see a point in paying for that. Facebook has gone full stupid - they should pay me for all the data mining they use me and my connections for. I rarely use FB for the social aspect anymore, I belong to many hobby and interest groups on it and use it more like a forum than a “highlight reel of my life” thing.
Isn't that a chicken-and-egg problem? If all the other alternatives are crap but can survive because of their deep pockets, how can we ever expect the Fediverse to grow without supporting it regardless of its current size?
That’s above my pay grade. I honestly don’t know. However, I’ll offer that Lemmy instances are somewhat analogous to the hobbyist or special interest forums of yesteryear. A “webring” of sorts. Smaller, cheaper, manageable by dedicated individuals…
They’re not massive and centralized servers requiring all that goes with operating and maintaining them. Ad injection, legal teams, CEOs to pay…the fediverse is a completely different animal compared to big social media. It exists because of lots of little “pockets” and not the deep pockets of centralized social media.
I'd would hope that was the case with Lemmy, but it seems that the majority of people that moved are just going to the largest instances and trying to replicate what they had on Reddit.
For Mastodon, there are indeed a good number of servers run by a small group of friends who simply don't care about its cost, but it's getting pretty clear that any instance with more than 1000 active users is simply not sustainable on donations alone. Every month there is a new instance closing down because the admins realized that the cost per user are growing faster than the donation base.
That’s unfortunate, and doesn’t bode well for the growth of this platform.
Yes, and this is why I've been saying for months already that if we really want to have a viable alternative to shit services we get from Big Tech, we need to start putting our money where our collective mouth is.
That’s a tough hill to climb. The internet grew on the largesse of individuals who contributed time and financial support to smaller endeavors, whether it be software or a website. It’s going to be all but impossible to get people to pay for it when even big services like Facebook are free, that’s the conundrum and why ad revenue and personal profile mining is used to fill the hole. Unfortunately costs have risen sharply alongside bandwidth demands, so one can’t run a basement server without bottlenecking on size or costs long before reaching critical mass for a community - and that’s what you mentioned in regards to lemmy.
Like I said…above my pay grade. I hope there’s some way a distributed network like Lemmy can succeed, I really enjoy what it’s becoming. Maybe a hub-and-spoke system will be the final form…big instances supported by more commercial means and smaller instances run by individuals and private funds.
And to go back to your original response: isn't that at least worth of some appreciation? Do you need to wait for the network to grow to start supporting it now by subscribing to a provider that costs $10/year (less than a dollar per month)?
I'm not into supporting alpha or beta versions, and honestly I don't spend enough time here to justify a subscription fee. If it were more fully fleshed out and had a lot more of the niche communities I enjoy, you bet...$10 or even $20/year would be worth paying to support the servers.
Ok, we will start going in circles already, but isn't that a bit of a "self-defeating prophecy"?
You say you like what it's becoming, but you don't want to support bootstrapping it. At the same time, history is showing us that any attempt to make the fediverse more popular is making the instances to crumble under their own weight because there is not strong backing after a certain size.
It's $10/year that we are talking about here, not a life-changing investment. If everyone keeps expecting high-quality content and an already optimized system that is able to be a home of billions of internet users (because the only realistic way for you get all the niche communities here will be when there are so many people here to the point that makes even the long tail a sizable group), then we will never get it.
It's tough because we've had "free" for so long of so many services. But I honestly think yes, as long as it was something very low like $5/month at most.
What if I tell you that for $5/month you can have a Mastodon account and bring 9 more of your friends?
I already donate to Mastodon development, and to the Mastodon server I'm on. It's a good reminder to donate to the Lemmy server I'm on too.
Good for you, but I specifically asked if you would join a server that charged from all users.
Also, if you don't mind me asking: how much are you contributing, and what if I told you that it would cost you a lot less to sign up to a professionally managed instance than whatever it is you are giving away each month?
I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it's worth it.
We can't expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
small communities of self-hosters that offer the services to those who don't possess the knowledge to do it themselves. These communities would self-host federated protocols (eg XMPP) so people can interact with others no matter which server they use.
Ideally maintained through users donations. If you want to be less idealistic, maybe small co-ops which charge a reasonable monthly/annual fee and provide free services for those who can't really afford to pay.
A bit too vague. Please:
The reason that I am asking you to be specific is that there is a good chance that professional providers can be more efficient than any "community-based" solution. We can have hundreds/thousands of independent professional service providers, each serving around 100-500k people, which would make a sustainable and healthy market. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that we would be able to serve the 2 billion people on e.g Instagram by having millions of "community based" instances of Pixelfed.
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
Donations only "work" if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don't see a penny out of it.
I don't see that big a difference there tbh. The WMF nowadays also has a paid trust and safety team like a social media platform.
The entirety of the English Wikipedia can be stored in a single commodity hard disk. The entire database (with revisions and all) is less than 1TB. All other wikipedias combined amount to something similar. This is probably less data than what Reddit ingests every day.
Less than 0.05% of the Wikipedia users have done any type of contribution to the content. The absolute majority is just visiting to read it.
The content of an encyclopedia changes way less often than any social network. Any page written can be a resource used for any high-school student doing research for an assignment. How many people bother to revisit week-old memes on Reddit or imgur, let alone something written decades ago? Yet, both Reddit and Wikipedia need to store all their content forever.
The "rule" of social media is that users split 1%/9%/90% on creators (prolific posters), participants (comments and reshares content that might be interesting to them) and lurkers (don't necessarily signup and only visit to read). That means that we have 200 times more "active" (0.05% vs 10%) users on social media relative to wikipedia. The operational costs and the staff required to moderate these sites should follow this proportion as well.
Isn't that the same for Reddit or Lemmy? The content creators and mods don't see a penny either. Operationally, a social network probably requires a lot more compute power and somewhat more bandwidth compared to a site that serves mostly static content. But I don't see why small donations shouldn't cover that. The cost per user seems moderate, otherwise few people could afford to run an instance with 1000s of users without charging them.
Yeah, but since when is this considered fair? Facebook has one million faults, but at the very least they pay their moderation and safety teams.
Is there any donation-based instance where the admins can make a living out of their labor? Even mastodon.social with more than 6 million users can only manage to have two developers on payroll, and they pay themselves a ridiculously low salary.
No because it would exclude all the interesting people, I'd much rather donate to keep a door open for all.
Are all "interesting people" so cash strapped that they wouldn't be able to afford a $10/year membership?
Anyway, what if I told you that my instance provides "group-based" billing? You could, e.g, get a 10-account package for $5/month and give access to 9 other people there.
I would still try to come up with some form of vouch or sponsorship-based system, where the paying members get to approve non-paying members if they have a backing sponsor.
Donation-based instances are not sustainable. You can see that already with Mastodon. They used to be able to get enough funds to even support upstream projects, now they are invite-only. Turns out that "keeping the door open for all" makes the operating costs rise faster than the revenue from donations.
Interesting people barely have time to pop onto Twitter every now and then, they're not going to bother if it costs money
And I guess we'll see which system ends up bearing fruit, I think we're already seeing the capitalist walled garden model falter, I suspect your more collectivist model won't have the momentum to replace it but while the commons might trip and start with a dozen different stumbles the sheer force of its ever growing ubiquity will carry it through.
Especially as hardware continues to get cheaper and software more efficient, hosting a few thousand users on a federated server is already fairly trivial, its only going to get easier the more hurdles are removed through innovation and tech creep.
In terms of costs, the predominant factor is storage, which does not go away and is ever increasing. But anyway the problem of instances with thousands of users is not the cost of hardware, but the labor involved with moderation, security, support...
I think I'd pay for Lemmy and Firefish. I like them both a lot. Not like a lot, but a tiny annual subscription fee.
If they had lifetime memberships like Livejournal did that would be cool.
Wouldn't give Elon the lice from my hair though, in the words of the great Maria Callas about her mother.
I'm not hosting Firefish (yet), but I do have $10/year plans for Lemmy and Mastodon. Is that within your idea of "tiny fee"?
Absolutely. Thanks for replying, please host Firefish, it's awesome.
To be 100% honest, I think that those that have a very specific server in mind would be better off by running their own instance, which I also do on Communick but still need to add Firefish to the list.
For the "basic" access, what I'd like to have is only one "single" instance that can "speak" Activity Pub, and then just serve different frontends that can provide the different functionality. This would IMNSHO make more sense because then people could have one single account regardless if they want to do microblogging, share pictures or talk on a forum like Lemmy.
I don't think either are really active enough to justify a cost and a payment restriction would just worsen that. I do think lemmy should be supported because the whole concept is what reddit and twitter should've been to begin with.
A one time fee? Perhaps. But not an ongoing subscription.
I would yes. If it was a reasonable price and guaranteed that my data wouldn't be monetised.
Yes, offering a service completely free of ads and tracking is a irrevocable principle on Communick. Can you let me know what you think of the pricing?
No. With the current model of social media selling advertising space, user data, and now subscription fees. No, I don't think I should have to contribute directly from my pocket to these mega media giants.
I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.
No, I don't think a subscriber-only based model would work. Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already, but what I imagine is the exorbitant cost of running a popular site.
Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.
The beauty of this is that I don't need to have a "huge" site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.
All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have "for free" is a lot better than having your data exploited.
The only thing that would get me to do it is for sports. It would have to have the games, shows, commentary nonsense and be able to live chat with other fans /players. A full experience of sports. Outside of that not a chance.