I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.
I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.
Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
- mastodon.technology shutdown because the admin ran out of bandwidth (family member was dying)
- mastodon.lol shutdown because the admin ran out of patience (some kind of nauseating fedi admin drama)
- switter shutdown because it didn’t have the legal means to comply with new online safety regulations that were being passed
- ownership of pawoo.net changed hands, twice! the first 2 owners figured it wasn’t sustainable financially to keep it online.
Their problem is that they allowed themselves to become too big and unsustainable in the long run.
It’s not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren’t enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won’t make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
If the instance becomes so big, that it depends on donations, then it is too big.
Exactly, I’m surprised how little I’ve seen this pointed out in this thread. There’s essentially zero reason for instances to grow beyond basic sustainability.
@petunia @Spzi Some are not about money: mastodon.lol is purely a personal decision; switter.at is not gonna lobby against governments that want to censor queer voices (which is what “online safety regulations” are really about). For Pawoo, Pixiv certainly had the money to keep it running, so this might be profitability concerns (given that at that time Pixiv also phased out other less-popular services to focus on its main platforms); CrossGate/Russell could be financial and liability concerns.
I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles.
There are no “big instances” in the Threadiverse. The largest one (LW) has less than 13k active MAU. These numbers are ridiculously low and offer no real stress to the system. Let’s 10x this number and see what starts happening.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU. And the bigger instances (LW, Beehaw) are balkanizing the Fediverse: trigger-happy with the defederation buttons, avoiding any instance that can bring “unwanted” activity, etc. Even if other instances start making experiments, they will only be interesting if they happen out in the open.
The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough.
Does it? From my perspective, we have a small group of people who are just messing around with things that they can run themselves, a slightly larger group of people who are discontent with reddit and wanted an alternative, but very few people who actually care about an alternative and are willing to put substantial resources to help with development and to accelerate adoption.
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
People are not forced to see ads. Ad blockers exist. Which in a way is actually a problem. People managed to enjoy sites and blocking ads, so they got used to the idea that no ads + free access is an universal possibility and the natural state of social networks.
As for price: I’ve been offering plans for Mastodon access that cost $0.50/month/user on communick. I’ve had exactly ZERO people on this plan.
My conclusion: it’s not the price point. It’s just that people don’t want to pay for social media.
Have you considered that it isn’t the price but the subscription? Many people I know have a real aversion against subscription services with this constant threat of being cut off and arbitrary price increases.
I am pretty sure an up-front single “life-time” price would have more takers, even if such a promise is obviously still subject to many caveats.
Subscriptions have gotten a bad rep lately because of companies that try to turn a product (like a car and heated seats) into a “service”, but there is nothing inherently wrong/unfair about someone that provides a service that has occurring and constant costs based on usage.
Also, for those that want to have full control over their own identity, they can have their own managed server, which is still a bit expensive but will be made a lot cheaper with the next generation of fediverse services (like takahe and mitra) . Once that gets more mature, users would be able to bring their own domain and a service provider would be a commodity like an email hosting service. In the case where I can port account and my identity to different providers by simply changing a DNS record, the power will be fully in the hands of the people and there will be nothing for them to worry about.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU.
Yes, because even with federation it is inherently advantageous for a user of a social platform to be among the largest pool of people they can identify, to make random stumbling into discussions and groups as likely as possible.
It’s a weird thing where we want the federation to provide a network of smallest scale platforms, yet we do this for social media, where the experience is naturally best when it starts with a single giant platform you filter down not an ocean of individual bits you have to glue together.
I’m guessing you are not old enough to remember how the internet used to work before Facebook? This idea that walled gardens are somewhat better is a meme that needs to die.
The web itself is the giant platform. Ease of discovery is not an inherent property of centralized networks, it’s just that we haven’t had built the proper tools to make this work in a decentralized manner.
To make my case: what killed RSS was not that it was difficult to discover new blogs. What killed RSS was that it couldn’t be monetized by the publishers when they started using it. What made Twitter so successful was that it let those publishers to have some sense of control over the distribution. Had we properly supported content creators with actual money instead of the promise of eyeballs, the internet would be a much better and healthier place than it is today.
Geezus. I’m old enough to remember how the Internet was before the Internet. Sorry. 😅
You however completely missed the point. Social media in its nature benefits from centralized approaches. As a use case. Independent of who operates it. Users have it easier the more central it is. It doesn’t need to be walled. Of course not. But it should be centralized.
But it should be centralized.
Again, I really don’t see why. Content/Peer discovery can all be made transparent for the user, addressing and distribution as well.
I see the benefit for those building the platforms which in turn make these networks more attractive to users, and I see how the overall cost of the whole system is lower if it is centralized (economies of scale and avoid redundancies), but I’m failing to see how (all else being equal) the users benefit from a centralized system over a distributed one.
The fact that you are on LW and I’m not does not stop us from doing anything on Lemmy that is possibly only on reddit. Why benefit would there be for me to join LW?
Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.
And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that’s why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.
In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They’d not even realize the content isn’t all on whatever instance they’re on, it’s fully transparent. Because that’s easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there’s still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.
It’s not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.
I think we are talking past each other. I understand that the current implementation of the federated social media lacks a lot of things, so I am not disagreeing that currently people would benefit from joining a bigger instance.
But my argument though is that we can have federated social media does not tend to overcentralization. If the Fediverse gets popular - really popular, tens of millions of active users popular - then there will be too many independent actors who will be participating and the whole system will lend itself to many different hosting schemes:
- business running their own servers, to keep their control over their own social media identity.
- companies who will give access to users contingent on another service (e.g, the NYT giving a free account to every subscriber of their newspaper, Vodafone setting up their own Mastodon service, free access for every mobile customer)
- public institutions
- self-hosters, community groups
- companies who will offer the service for “free” and will try to monetize the service through some other means (e.g, Facebook/Threads)
IOW, if things grow and it becomes a viable alternative to the status quo, it will end up as a core infrastructure component, like email. And yes, Gmail is by far the largest provider and the hold a lot of power, but even they can’t simply decree to flip the tables in their favor.
I disagree… as a user you want relative proximity, but not centralisation. Which is exactly what federation provides.
Think of it like stores:
The centralized social-media is a bit like those big-box stores that have a little of everything. Hard to navigate and find the stuff, usually they only offer the items with broader appeal, and the entire experience is just unpleasant.
The Fediverse is more like a mall with many smaller shops. Small niche shops can survive because the many other shops drive foot traffic and if you are not interested in tools for example, you can just not enter the hardware store.
Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation.
The hell there is.
When “I want to socialize”, I don’t have to go march up at the UN headquarters, the Vatican or whoever “controls people” and ask for consideration. I can literally just walk out my door and walk to my local plaza. Or maybe the local grocery market. If I’m feeling lucky I can take the first googelbus and go to the nearest stadium, anime store or vintage disco bar. None of those needs to rely on the fact that other supermarkets or stadiums exist to provide socialization.
I agree with your overall sentiment but am I crazy or is RSS more popular than ever?
I doubt it is overall, but I’ve certainly seen more talk about it lately than I ever have. Not surprising considering how many reddit refugees I’ve been chatting with.
Is it? Maybe in absolute numbers it has gone up, but I remember when established newspapers and journalists would write on their blog and have full-text feeds, while nowadays everything seems to be on substack/medium and the RSS feeds just puts out a link to the gated content.
If you include podcasts, which are delivered via RSS by definition, undoubtedly RSS is more popular than ever.
It’s a little disingenuous to do that though, so in this context we probably shouldn’t count it.
Point where I said we should run ads
I didn’t care so much about specific wordings but answered to the gist of it. Yes, I cannot strictly quote you on that, but so what?
“Many are opposed to ads” gave the impression it would be worth considering to have ads.
Anyways, that’s like the least interesting angle, to discuss what specific words you used.
Before we revert to ads surly we try medals. Set a standard price on each. Then when a comment/post recieves such a thing divide that reward between user, user instance, post user, post instance, community, and community instace. That way servers, admins, and high quality content creators all have an incentive. It could theoreticaly be weigted however wanted. Only issue I see is it would need some sot of blockchain to ensure no fuckery goes on.
The “financial aspect” is much smaller than you seem to think.
It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.
You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don’t know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you’re making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.
(note: I am a social democratic capitalist, don’t take this as an anti-capitalist rant)
Ever wonder why capitalistic IT is so expensive?
It’s not because of the cost of developers, hardware or internet, even though those things are not cheap.
It’s mainly because companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft make insanely huge profits and those profits must come from revenue. And to ensure they don’t lose market share, they overspend an insane amount on hiring armies of the best developers, most of whom aren’t doing much productive work, but are paid hefty salaries.
And they also have complex internal politics, manager layers, architects, and a whole lot of highly paid people working alongside the developers and slowing them down.
So the parent is totally right. Hosting something like Lemmy and developing it isn’t that expensive, especially because it runs on a lot of volunteer time and doesn’t have a lot of fluff around it.
And also, they aren’t spending armies of developers and UX engineers to analyze and maximize the number of hours you spend on Lemmy. Or to maximize ad revenue. Or to implement DRM. Or to think of a premium offer and then develop a two tiered experience.
Once you get rid of all the capitalistic fluff, most of the basics we need are surprisingly cheap and easy to develop and run.
I do believe people should make it a regular practice to pay for the software they like and use. So donate here and there.
But if you are ever in doubt, just look at the sheer number of Linux distros built and maintained by volunteers.
I’d suggest the “complex internal politics, manager layers, architects” – and the fancy offices, cafeterias, and other amenities – are actually quite a lot more expensive than the developers.
But don’t underestimate ads, and things that are similar to ads. In competitive markets, ads are really expensive, because ads are rivalrous. Venture A has to outbid Venture B for ad placement. The same sort of logic goes for hiring, especially hiring of trend-driven fields like project management. (“I’m a Scrum Master, who are you, a scum master?”)
I agree.
In terms of things that make capitalistic IT expensive, #1 would be the profit extracted by shareholders (either directly or through licensing schemes) , #2 would be the layer of highly paid “very important people” and then #3 would be developer cost.
One note: It’s pretty rare for tech companies to directly issue profits to shareholders (i.e. as dividends). Rather, profits are usually reinvested into expanding the company; and shareholders make money by selling shares that have risen in value.
Eh… Tech companies do some of the biggest stock buybacks, which is a transfer of profits to shareholders.
But yes, they also reinvest money.
I don’t know yet there have been several instances that shut down do to finances. Tell me how does something shut down due to finances if it’s not costly for the person? The Fediverse is also much larger than Lemmy.
In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649
People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it’s not as expensive to run as you seem to think.
This is ONE instance. Search or make a post and ask how many instances have shut down due to finances. Outside of finances it’s burnout due to moderation.
I think “shut down due to finances” really means “it was too much work to organize this, collect donations and run a production website” or “my site was too niche to attract users and i didn’t want to put the effort in”.
There’s enough instances with public finances, to show that it’s a solvable problem.
Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?
Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?
Does it matter? What if I start 24 instances tomorrow and shut them all down by friday? Does that really have an impact on sustainability? Conversely them pointing to lemmy.world is a prime example of exactly how it is sustainable. As long as one instance remains running it is sustaining. Other instances may come and go and that’s sad and all. But it’s pretty affordable by most metrics
It does matter if people are on your instance, just say you don’t care about others. Several instances have shutdown without warning and people lost their accounts. It matters because people matters. We should also want good experiences. Stating that people will get over it and find a new instance and make new posting history is selfish af
Untold email servers have shut down and people have lost their accounts there. But email seems pretty sustainable still. So that doesn’t seem like a good metric either.
Do the expenses include the cost of labor from admins and moderators?
When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?
Lemmy.world is the largest instance and is getting less than 25 cents per user in donations. Meanwhile, Facebook has shown that the true price of what a privacy-respecting social media site is around 10€/month. Do you really think that 25 cents per user is enough to keep this minimally professional?
Facebook doesn’t have a lot of reason to go be telling exactly the truth there …
The precise price doesn’t matter, but the order of magnitude does.
Even if Zuck is lying and he is pushing a high price as extortion tactic. Cut that 10€ by 4 and let’s say that the “real” price is 2.50€. That’s still 10x more than lemmy.world is getting in donations.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Maybe it’s just better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services instead of one monopoly service; and this is reflected in the way the world actually behaves towards these different services.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they’re so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Conversely, the fact that they are one single corporation lets them achieve economies of scale and reduce their operational costs per user.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Yeah, so what? Do you think that the developers of free software, the admins of the instances and the moderators putting in time to make this work don’t deserve recognition/compensation for their work?
You are basically saying that only martyrs should be doing work on FOSS, the Fediverse and anything that is based on a good ethical foundation. It’s basically giving the middle finger to the people who can actually make a difference.
better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services
Absolutely agree. The more decentralized, the more resilient we become. However, the cost per user does not go down, in fact it goes up. Running the infrastructure to serve 2 billion people (like Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp) requires massive resources already in a centralized/highly optimized corporation, on a decentralized structure it will cost even more. The question is: are the people willing to bear these costs? So far, the data says “no, they are not”.
When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?
Why not? It’s a hobby project.
I thought we didn’t want big companies to control the fediverse? But if we want people to main-job it, then naturally you’re turning it into a business, and sooner or later the larger it gets, the largest will be, well, a big company. Naturally. A Lemmy-company, basically. Lemmy.world Ltd.
Do we want big business to run the place, or not? In the latter case, it cannot be a viable full time job, or it will naturally turn into the former if successful.
Why not? It’s a hobby project.
Why?! Why be self-limiting about it?
Do you think that when NLNet gave the Lemmy devs a grant, they were just funding a hobby or do you think they were hoping to make it a viable alternative?
Do we want big business to run the place, or not? In the latter case, it cannot be a viable full time job, or it will naturally turn into the former if successful.
It does not follow. As long as it is open source, it can not be controlled by any single entity. History is full of cases of companies that tried to exert control over open platforms and it did not end up well for them.
For context lemmy.ca runs on $125/cdn month and could be downsized still, we’ve overspecced for the load we get today. We could probably cut that in half.
At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.
- The server owners do it, by paying from their own pockets. Only viable as long as the server is small and the owners are deeply concerned with the success of the server.
- A third party does it by sponsorship, advertisement, etc. Bad idea as they will eventually want to meddle with your content - astroturfing, selective enforcement of rules, etc.
- The userbase does it by donations, membership, etc. Frankly I think that it’s the most reasonable solution.
OP raised the concern that most people won’t donate. Does it really matter? I don’t think so; what matters is the total amount being donated, not who does it. If it is a concern, perhaps a subscription model could work, too, but the instance would need to show some service beyond what you’d expect from a Lemmy/Mastodon/Kbin/etc. instance.
I’m from the belief that “ethical ads” are a trap. 90% won’t be ethical, and the 10% left won’t pay you much. That’s how the cookie crumbles.
Another concern that I see is moderation, as it’s part of what makes an instance viable or not. The old Reddit model (let users moderate users) is surprisingly good in this aspect, as it allows the server owners to only address server-wide issues, but IMO it needs to be improved on (for example, letting admins and mods recruit users for specific tasks - e.g. I might trust someone to remove content, but perhaps not to ban users).
I agree with everything you’ve said. I think option 3 is the best and most reasonable option. A Freemium model makes the most sense.
I can only say that when the provider of my instance ask for donations, I will donate. Because they do a bloody good service on all sides and that should be honoured. I guess that this is applicable to all instances?
Donations isn’t the way to go because most people don’t. I’ve seen about three polls that have had thousands of responses and the majority of people fell in the never donated category and many fell in the never donated and will not donate category. Something feels wrong about leaving people’s hard work to donations, obviously it should be a part of the equation.
I donate, and I’ll donate again, and as far as I know it is covering costs. I believe the person who runs this instance (Jonah) does so because he wants to, and if he should ever decide to close it, then I think he should, if it stops bringing him joy and fulfillment.
I feel like you are devaluing the fediverse by reducing it to monetary value. Simply put: If we are talking about bringing in corporate sponsors and ads, then speaking for myself, not only would I no longer donate, but I would no longer feel connected in any way to this platform.
There are plenty of other forums that aren’t federated but are sustained by people because they want to, not because of monetary gain.
Just look how monetization has leeched the soul out of things like podcasts and YouTube (I’d say reddit, but reddit was never good to begin with). Do you really want that here? I know I don’t. I’d rather see it end than become another site like that.
What is your definition of “covering costs”? If the person running the instance goes to say "I actually enjoy this so much that I want to make my full-time job. My salary as whatever is $150k/year, so to this full-time I need to make at least that much. "
Do you think that the admin is being fair? Are you going to continue donating? Is the amount of your donation contingent on how much they are getting in total?
Where did I say corporate sponsors and ads? Please state where I said that. It’s obnoxious how often people state something incorrectly particularly when the original post wasn’t ambiguous. I feel that YOU and others are devaluing the Fediverse by poo pooing over people’s hard work and time. A thank you simply isn’t enough. If im wrong for valuing people that’s a hill I’m willing to die on.
You said you want good faith discussions, but you preemptively dismissed one of the biggest answers because you don’t think it’s a good solution. Then you have people here disagreeing with you, explaining why, and pointing to examples of it being done successfully, and you continue to completely dismiss a donation as nothing more than a “thank you” - how is this in any way a good faith discussion if any opposing viewpoint is immediately met with this kind of “YOU’RE the problem” response?
I do understand your frustration in those cases in which donations fail, but it seems like you’re not willing to meet us halfway and acknowledge that sometimes, donations succeed, and not by accident or luck. There’s data there - test cases we could be picking apart and seeing what critical mass needs to be reached before an instance can reliably secure donations and what we can do for admins until their instances reach that threshold. But you’re just dismissing it as nonviable even though it clearly works for a lot of places.
That is not good faith.
It’s not good faith to point to a donations working and saying that’s why it should remain that way. It’s not good faith when people are disagreeing with me yet participate in capitalism daily. I’m not talking about the important needs, we can’t escape that. I’m talking about leisure: vacations, video games, etc People here do those optional activities yet it’s some sort of sin to say let’s explore options to keep this place running and compensate the people that makes this all work
You seem to be a victim of the disease called capitalistus brainrottus. I already said I donate, but I wouldn’t even consider that to be as much a show of gratitude as someone who doesn’t donate as much but contributes more content.
I was a Skyrim mod author and you pearl clutchers were always preaching doom and gloom there too, but fortunately there you failed while those who contributed freely and openly thrived. You who can’t conceive of value beyond mere currency, where everything you do is transactional. I feel sorry for you.
Imaging doing something because you like doing it. Unthinkable!
So thank you for your contributions to Skyrim then and to the fediverse now!
You say you want good faith discussion, but you’ve completely nixed the main point we have today, with no room for argument. You may not know it, but you are coming at this in bad faith.
How?
Donations are a sustainable model for development. Less sustainable than government taxation, but more sustainable than ads, subscriptions, and/or fees by a mile.
I mean Reddit Gold was a cool idea back in its heyday.
But yeah, funding it via donations comes with some implications in regards to cutting non-donation costs.
Say you have a single donation tier, on patreon or so. If push comes to shove and you get too few donations, the following would be perfectly understandable things to happen:
- To cut costs, non-donating users are rate-limited for their interactions.
- To cut staff cost, defederation is vigorously employed to both cut external content to review and also marginally cut server cost from the actual federation updates.
- To further cut staff cost, non-donating users will automatically be temp-banned if reported with no prior investigation, and placed in a low-priority review queue.
These all sound grotesque, but also understandable if you think about it, in particular the last one as personell cost is always really significant. Yeah you could argue “might as well go paid-only”, sure. But to a point free users are okay, they just have to accept that in any “maybe” situation, they’ll always lose out due to costing too much vs paying too little (nothing that is). “You get what you pay for” would be a way of putting it.
I get what you’re saying and I appreciate your view instead of immediately going to attack mode like many others. Donations are great but aren’t sustainable long term. I think a freemium model would work
The moderation could be the biggest part of wanting to just quit. Humans are pretty shitty creatures especially when anonymity is involved. This definitely has nothing to do with finances. It’s not expensive at all. If someone shut theirs down due to finances then their life was probably crumbling and that can happen to anyone. What is your question?
Mine’s relatively small and I haven’t had a single donation from the ~400 users.
Also if they did donate, less than a dollar each, the server would be paid for an entire year.
As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly out of my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.
I think the real problem is not financial, but technical problems. For example, when a post is shared in an instance, that instance sends that activity to approximately 1000 other active instances. As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around :) I’m not sure how it will scale in the future.
In addition, since each instance keeps all the data in its own database, the database size of the instance with 1m users and the instance with 1k users is the same. In my opinion, this is what is really unsustainable.
Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.
My presumption was that there was some robust but efficient network of servers that aided cache and data retrieval.
As you say, data synch seems to put a decent load in all servers which grows as the network does. Seems like a problem that’s been kicked down the road. As you say.
Though I was technically naive about how the fediverse could work, I was generally curious … but when I found out it’s distributed data synchronisation it was one of those moments in tech when you realise something isn’t that fancy and is done essentially the way most people would do it if they had to design it.
Well… KISS is a good concept for a reason. There’s on paper no reason - at least before running into actual issues - to find something fancier than just replicating updates across known other network members.
Oh I know. But by 2022 the Fedi had been running for years so I’d figured something fancy had at least become necessary by that point. How much of a problem it is I don’t know but I’ve definitely heard that the load of pushing out all the sync has been significant for some servers, lemmy instances included during the migration. And then there’s the storage costs, where that’s probably a much smaller problem but might come up at some point not far down the line??
As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around
It’d be neat if there was some form of peer-to-peer activity-push to resolve this; basically offload your pushes to other instances, and in return they can offer some of theirs to yours. I think that gets quite difficult though, especially as large lists of federated/whitelisted/defederated instances come into play.
Hehe, I wonder if some technology like Tor could help here, distributing the work across many servers instead of each one having to do all the work entirely by itself? One day, if someone wants to build it, that may come, but it will not be me, nor today it seems:-P.
Servers aren’t free though. So you’re going to get people who do it as a passion project and hope they have the tools to moderate their own instance or a small team of volunteers to help which is dependent on unpaid labor.
There needs to be money behind any stability.
Exactly! Judging by the downvotes already people don’t agree. It’s bothersome to let people’s hard work on multiple levels to go undervalued. Servers absolutely aren’t free. Moderation is a heck of a job.
I’ve wondered a lot about this.
Ultimately, I think we’re going to need to compensate the devs, mods and contributors if we want this to succeed long term.
How to do that with a group that is (understandably) allergic to ads is another question.
Wikipedia does it just fine, I’d argue they’re a pretty good comparison with similar overhead - developers, moderators, infrastructure. (Except obviously they’re a single org, rather than distributed.)
Wikipedia is also a registered charity, has a $100,000,000 endowment and receives substantial funding from philanthropic foundations and tech giants.
Personally, I don’t think that’s a particularly realistic approach/funding model for Lemmy.
On the other hand I think the way they do a donations drive every year is a good idea and probably works well. The Fedi could benefit from that I’d bet.
The Fedi could absolutely benefit from something like that!
I wonder if we could coordinate and plan a day/weekend (sometime when we expect a large number of users) where folks have memes about donating, encourages people to, devs tell us about their needs/plans etc…
At the same time and just to pump the brakes a little, I work in charitable giving and for at least our organization, while we do mass donor drives, those are mostly about engagement as the real money comes from high level donors. That being said, our potential donor population and strengths are probably very different.
How was it done in the past? Forums? BBSes? Fidonet?
Well yeah, compare us to 20 years of wikipedia and of course there’s going to be a massive difference. I’m not saying we’re going to follow them, but they are an example of success in this area.
Wikipedia employed a single server until 2004 when the server setup was expanded into a distributed multitier architecture. Server downtime in 2003 led to the first fundraising drive.
It’s also an explicitly philanthropic venture with a noble mission about being the source of human knowledge.
I love our memes but they aren’t quite the same.
Wikipedia received almost 400k in 2005 and more than 1.5 million in donations by 2006.
For what it’s worth, a lot of instances are funding just like wikipedia did but if we want to expand with full-time devs, moderators etc (which is what I think we’ll need for long term sustainability) I just don’t think wikipedia’s success is a particularly reasonable comparison.
Oh, it is absolutely understandable when it comes to the ads part. But there are other ways. Plus, there are ethical ads and Open Source ad companies, maybe that’s something to look into. I just know we need to explore ethical options and not just rely on donations.
Yup. I wonder how much transparency and a self sustaining model (vs maximize profits) could bring down costs to even make it a subscribe free but with ethical ads or something.
It’s tough. We want to walk the line between accessible for everyone vs thing that crashes and relies pretty heavily on a handful of posters and an even smaller number of mods.
You could test out your idea by spinning up an instance that offers curated ads, or probably better yet go entirely ad-free and have a subscription service. Some people may be interested in sustainability, especially if you speak in a language that resonates with them, like explain the value-added benefits of being on a sustainable server vs. a “free” one. e.g. the devs get a salary there and also contribute to the overall Lemmy codebase, beyond that instance so that it benefits the entire Fediverse. But it would be up to you to be the change that you want to see in the world, and make it happen. Also, I am guessing those kinds of discussions won’t happen so much on the Fediverse itself, but rather in Matrix or Discord (or Slack?) servers were the actual developers of the Fediverse hang out.
I’m doing that for 4 years already and I’m arriving at the sad realization that no, not enough people care about “sustainability”, “privacy” and even less about the actual benefit of using a social media platform that doesn’t exploit user data and their attention.
Yep … the whole “this giant platform is free (because you’re the product)” era has done some serious damage that the internet may never truly recover from. Genuinely, with whatever AI is going to do to the internet, that moment we had of people freely associating and building their own spaces online may never return to any mainstream degree.
In many ways, some of the user-friendliness issues the fediverse has had is people being so accustomed to being able to just sign up to free stuff and expect it to be awesome without any work on their part. Now while the fediverse does have genuine user-experience issues IMO, it’s obvious by its very nature that it requires effort on the part of users and organisers etc to make it work … becuase it is literally a “by the people for the people” type of situation. That so many can’t even recognise that this is true of the fedi let alone compute what it means and requires is a loss for the internet and in many ways the actual “front-line” of this movement.
Your posts here are also the very first time I ever heard of “communick”, so take from that what you want.
Back in August I wrote a post about it which was pretty well received but the LW mods banned me for “advertising”. I think it was a pure crab-mentality move, but I won’t delve too deep into it.
Anyway, now that you know about it, what are you going to do something with it?
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Then you are definitely adding more to this conversation than me: actual evidence trumps mere armchair theorizing every time:-).
There is nothing new under the sun it seems, and so many people are so very short-sighted, that your story makes perfect sense, unfortunately.
Yes, there’s the Matrix spaces and ActivityPub forum where these types of conversations are had, but the masses don’t know about them and or aren’t involved. I like getting the people that will be directly impacted opinion. I don’t care about ads, it was a post to explore options. You bring up very good points and I appreciate that.
I guess most instances are going to ask members a small yearly contribution, like 10$ per year or something. That could make the servers more sustainable
I dont think you are right that most people dont want to donate. All big fediverse instances are funded by users. Every user may not want to pay the few cents that it costs to host the instance for them but there are enough users that donate $10+ to cover hosting costs for the other users.
All big fediverse instances are funded by users.
This isn’t true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to https://fediverse.observer/list
- mstdn.jp, pawoo.net, mastodon.cloud are run out of pocket (by the same owner (!!!)).
- misskey.io is partially funded by ads., registrations from non-Japanese IPs were also closed shortly after the Musk takeover.
- Funding for mastodon.social and mastodon.online is co-mingled with the funding for Mastodon the software project
- baraag.net barely has the funds to secure enough capacity for the number of users it serves (registrations have been closed for the past year)
- The admin of mstdn.social was apparently short on rent this month? (!!!)
- daystorm and pravda don’t count because their numbers are spoofed
- mastodon.world and mas.to can count themselves as lucky enough to be truly user-funded and (seemingly?) sustainable.
OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I have two friends that can use some spare space on my NAS. If I ever randomly pull the plug on that, they got pretty little to complain about tbh, short of me not giving any prior notice which would be nice since they personally know me. Since mastodon/lemmy providers don’t even have that, I also wouldn’t fault them for not giving such notice.
🤷
Does it matter? Not really, IMO. Social media as a whole is a scourge, and plenty of the bigger sites with corporations behind them are run at a negative, so there seems to be no good financial solution in sight so far. If you could just collect a few donations or run some ads, you bet the corporations would long have done that and be far in the black. But they’re not, so that hints at an inherent issue of usercount vs perceived per-user-value that makes users unwilling to spend on the service they’re using.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I don’t know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It’s a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.
Yes, they are “provided as is, with no guarantees” but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.
None of the big fediverse instances are in the black when you account for the cost of labor from admins and moderators.
I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time. I’m pretty sure there are instances that pay admins and contribute to the dev team upstream. The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.
I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time.
Then you can not say that these instances are well-funded. Computers and electricity is peanuts when compared to the cost of having real people doing moderation, dealing with moderation issues, etc.
The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.
You are going at this backwards.
There is plenty of work to be done on the fediverse, but the people doing it can not do it full-time because users don’t pay or support them.
Firstly I did not say that the instances were “well-funded”. The discussion is about sustainability and the main on going cost is server hosting. Most big instances can cover server costs by donations and still have thousands in the coffer. These instances also have people that are happy to volunteer their time to moderate and resolve sysadmin related problems that arise. This has been the case for many years and I dont think we will run out of contributors as the fediverse grows.
Secondly, I may be misinterpreting you but it seems to me that you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance. So we should look at an example of a group that does both. If we take a look at Mastodon.social we can see from their annual report they pulled in 327k euros in donations. Operating costs were 127k and personal costs were 80k. The staff are freelancers and work as required are paid with rates ranging from 50/h to 200/h. This includes developers and UX designers for multiple platforms.
Since Lemmy is quite new and the project is growing rapidly it is experience growing pains. These issues require the sys admins in each instance to do work to resolve the issue and maintain the instance. As the software matures I expect the work required to maintain the instance will decrease. I expect that instances will need to use volunteer labor while they are small but will be able to pay staff once they grow large enough. I do not expect moderators will ever be paid because that would be very expensive and a nightmare to manage. Small instances are cheap to run and run into less issues requiring admins to step in.
Going by what I outlined about I believe that the fediverse is sustainable for large servers and small. I dont think we will ever reach a stage where the only servers are corporate servers sustained by ads and investment. I dont think OP provides enough evidence that donations are not enough to sustain the fediverse.
personal costs were 80k.
And that is for their two-full time developers. Do you realize how low that is?
you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance.
Take any service that you use and paid for: do you know exactly how much of the bill is for each role?
When you pay for a movie ticket, do you know the exact split of how much goes to each person involved in the production?
It makes no sense to try to separate the costs here. At the end of the day, what really determines the viability of the whole enterprise is a simple balance sheet. If the consumers are giving enough money to satisfy the people involved, great. If not, there will either be someone getting exploited or there will be no product.
Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs? If it makes no sense to breakdown the costs then there is no point in debating that the donation model is unsustainable because we can look at history and see that the fedidiverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs?
Because that’s all they have on payroll, full-time. Gargron and ClearlyClaire are the only employees of Mastodon GmbH. Gargron is reportedly taking 30k€/year as a salary. This is laughably low. I’m not saying it to dismiss Eugen, but to demonstrate how little the most prominent developers in the Fediverse are being rewarded by their work.
the fediverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
Let’s drop the hopium. The Fediverse is not growing. We saw occasional waves of people coming due to Musk’s take over of Twitter, but few of them stayed around. Lemmy had over 100k MAU in July, and now we are at ~36k MAU.
“Instances continue to run fine” is absolutely not true. Lemmy is looking a bit more stable nowadays, but a lot of it is simply due to the fact that there is less activity now and because the LW admins are shutting down / defederating from any instance that sneeze at their way with a bit more activity. If we look at the Mastodon side which is a bit more mature:
- Mastodon’s instances shutting down because admins got tired of the abuse and entitlement from its users is a weekly occurrence.
- Newsie.social (an instance with 20k registered users) was on the brink of closing down but got saved on the last minute because it soft-merged with journa.host
- Go to /r/Mastodon and you will see stories of instances that disappeared without notice.
I didn’t state that it was my opinion. It was three separate polls that asked about donations. The second highest was always the have not donated and will not donate
I’ve never run a server, so I can’t really say much about how sustainable it is to do it right now, but ultimately I don’t see why it should be able less sustainable than running any other popular website.
Granted, I think you’re totally right that there’s a generally unsustainable attitude that’s pervasive on the fediverse and the open source community in general, which amounts to a sentiment that “someone else will pay for all this”. It’s wrong, it’s naive, it’s unhelpful, and it’s basically an express lane towards the tragedy of the commons. I’ve worked for non-profits and I’ve seen first hand how difficult it can be to turn users into supporters, but the sad truth is that non-profits are just like businesses in the sense that if costs are higher than revenue they will not survive very long, and this is true for community run fediverse services too.
I do think that people who like the fediverse should want it to become financially sustainable, at the very least.
I’m open to the idea of limited, non-invasive ads for example. (Plus I think that if the fediverse ever becomes massively popular we’re going to see thinly veiled ads anyway, in the form of “influencers” and “sponsored content”. That’s inevitable, and honestly probably even worse that straight-forward ads.) I would not leave my Kbin.social or my current Mastodon instance if there were a small number of ads.
Also I could be wrong on this but IIRC, Misskey supports user data storage quotas that can be expanded for a price. And I think that’s potentially a smart and sustainable method of getting those people who make heavy use of their server to chip in a little bit. If someone wants to post a lot of images, audio and video to their Mastodon, Pixelfed, Peertube, Lemmy, etc., instance then I think it’s reasonable to expect them to cover some small fraction of the hosting cost by becoming a paying member or paying for a server-level storage plan.
My thoughts:
- I think this is ultimately about growth. The Fedi can survive in its current DIY donations based form, but growth, seems less likely I agree. This growth need not be crazy, I’m talking about normal healthy growth.
- The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
- There’s also a bit of a privilege problem too I’d guess where underprivileged people are naturally pushed out of admin work because they just can’t afford to do it. I think it’d be culturally nice if that weren’t the case.
- so in a way a question here is whether admins and moderators should at least in some instances get some form of salary. I think that’s an interesting idea, and that the Fedi would certainly benefit from having people dedicated on a more full time basis to making things good.
Being all that, my general take is that for the Fedi to grow it has two major cultural issues it needs to address:
- The lack of software collaboration and reusable and composable software
- The aversive relationship with money, as you say. You can’t deny the existence of the capitalistic world outside, and doing so, no matter your values, will I bet ultimately come with some trade offs that maybe aren’t worth it and maybe more will not want.
I appreciate your reasoned response and approach. I’m not denying the harms of capitalism but let’s be honest here we all benefit and we all participate. We buy clothes, shoes, games, etc everyday people here against capitalism participate by buying goods that are leisure. So, why then to suggest options outside of donations is terrible? Admins/mods put in a great deal of work that shouldn’t just be left up to donations. Sure, money can make things get ugly but if one truly believes in the ethos of this place then we can trust it would be handled correctly.
Sorry, I’m a little confused, I didn’t suggest options outside of donations are terrible.
To quote myself (amongst other statements in my post)
The issue, as you say, isn’t just server costs, it’s giving the people who do the work a helping hand to live and be rewarded. It’s the sustainability of the admins and moderators where burn out is a real problem.
Totally out of a blue idea. Probably stupid but… what if there was a system which shows the community in real time how much money is needed/dev,mod,hoster time is worth, and people “top up the jar”. No mystery of „they’re probably already been donated enough”. We’d see how much is needed. Probably would need to have a bit of trust to the receivers not to abuse it but… idk just random thought lol
As a numbers junkie and server admin, I would like to see this start as part of the servers public/private metrics… the server admins can update a few values regularly (cost/time/usage) which can be mashed with active user stats to give a final cost/user that could be publicly available.
then you bolt on the donation pieces and youve got community funding with transparency.
yeah, youre going to need to trust a human being or 3 along the way, but … yeah.
I know that those that use Open Collective it does something like this, but you have to be approved
Honestly even if the Fediverse is mainly run by corporations, that is still 100x better than the non-fediverse. Mainly because the direct and immediate competition from other instances will keep them in check. You can’t pull shit like Reddit, when users could immediately leave and get an almost perfect substitute. And I believe there will always be a substantial amount of crowd or privately funded “community instances”, whose major goal is just good social media.
I can understand. I just would prefer the more indie aspect remain in control of the people. That admins and mods can be compensated for their hard work and for costs/fees
