It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of "millions of users", which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.
But I don't think that's the path you'll see super often. Most people enthusiast enough to host their own instance and open it to others probably disagree with ads, and users are very likely going to reject them.
Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you'd expect to be running ad blocking software.
But if federated social networks keep growing to the point they could rival a platform like Reddit, for sure some ad supported instances will coexist with user-funded ones.
Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.
Same was true of reddit when I started there...
Hell, Facebook used to just be a tool to find people in your class for sharing notes at first.
Social media starts out niche and then once the community is built, others join.
I'd like the idea of certain instances becoming so large that it attracts the larger populous and becomes one of the major platforms. That is if it remains to be open source and federated.
(Edit: or just a community)
Why is background crypto mining not used? If it's openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.
I'm probably just being idealist of whatever but personally I really hope it doesn't. I don't really like the idea of one instance getting so big that it has the ability to disrupt all the other ones, I'd much prefer in was all just little niche servers run by people who are passionate about the subject, even if it's not making them any money.
But probably it'll all just eventually conglomerate into one big thing and then turn rotten and we'll all have to find something else, because that always seems to be the way it goes. But these are the wild west days for this platform, enjoy it while it lasts!
Crypto mining has a lot of negative conotations, and for good reason. The whole crypto ecosystem is full of scammers and bad actors. And ad supported websites only have incentive to monetize more and more until they are ad infested and can only be used with an ad blocker. That's the state of a lot of the web today. Plus most big ad networks come with user tracking baked in which is another downside.
I'd rather have a nominal subscription model just to cover costs rather than see an ad anywhere. The cost of hosting per user can't be much more than a dollar or two per month. Web hosting isn't all that expensive nowadays.
Why is background crypto mining not used? If it’s openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.
Honey, no... I appreciate where your head is at with this one, but the goal is to make browsing an instance a good experience, and as computationally simple as possible. Adding mining to the front end of an instance client is very poor for the long term sustainability of the app, because it will incur electricity costs for the end users that will have diminished returns for the instance. So it is a very inefficient way to fund large instances. Users would save money by giving instances money directly rather than letting them mine on their clients.
Ads work because the advertiser believes that their is market value in showing a user an ad, and they can be right or wrong, but financially they are willing to pay more than the electricity cost of showing the ad. I don't even mind the idea of ad supported instances in principle, although I would probably block them to preserve my browsing experience.
I'm gone if there is ads even though I'd block them. I'm sick of ads. They have ruined the internet .
If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
I'm here because its not like the rest of the internet.
I run tor relays to help the network, I contribute to foss projects and I seed distros too for the greater good. There is enough of us here to keep it going.
I've been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it's time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I'd be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn't mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.
I run my own instance and I don’t run ads because I frankly hate seeing them myself. They clutter up the web view, cause lag on the webpage, and frankly are annoying and ugly to look at.
I’d rather pay out of my own pocket to keep my instance going rather than run ads. Donations would be ideal to help keep it running for longer. As sad as it is, if I couldn’t keep paying the server costs and there weren’t any donations.. I’d just shut the server down. I personally will never run ads on an instance I run. I don’t want to perpetuate or support the lifeless corporate greed cycle.
If it is just a single person private instance, relatively cheap (like a few USD). As you scale it up though it does quickly get pricey. I think mine is around 20-25ish/mo plus 4/mo for backups. I know some of the bigger instances are closer to 50-100/mo and it’s only going up as their users go up.
I use https://1984.hosting (for privacy) to run my instance on a VPS. I'm using 1 core 2GB RAM VPS and that costs 10 dollars a month. So far everything looks to be running pretty well.
There probably are cheaper VPS providers as well, so you likely will be able to go cheaper.
Ads on Reddit were one of the reasons that third party apps were so popular... They didn't show them.
The whole point is to get away from Reddit, not just make several smaller copies. No thanks. I've donated already, and I'll donate again (to Jerboa, Lemmy devs, and instances if they prove their worthiness.
The members here now are least likely to want a centralized instance.
The July 1st influx will be similar.
Future waves from other FU's will get progressively less techie and more likely to see federated communities as meaning that "this is STILL not ready as a drop-in replacement??".
That said, I joined reddit so long ago that people looked at me cross-eyed when I tried to explain sub-reddits. You would think that something analogous to sections of a newspaper wouldn't be THAT difficult to grasp, yet here we are with people freaking out that now it's basically just saying we have different sections of different newspapers.
"Yes, Virginia, there is a Technology section at 2 different newspapers. You might even come to appreciate being able to get 2 different slants on the same topics."
"No, you don't have to live in a city to subscribe to their newspaper. It's really not much tougher than mailing someone in another city and you do that already."
The truth is that most people, even those who have been burned repeatedly by centralization, won't appreciate that it's worth modest effort to avoid it until there is at least one very large Lemmy instance that gets its Zuck / Elon / Spez.
That said, they aren't the only option. Donations are a big alternative. That's why Wikipedia is ad free, for example. The other big one is subscriptions, but you basically have to offer a lot to convince anyone to subscribe. And a lot of "subscriptions" are actually just a convenient way to donate, which should be viewed differently from non-donations, since far fewer people are willing to donate, due to being completely optional.
There's also sponsored content, but that's just deceptive ads. I'd rather ads be 100% transparent and obvious about being an ad.
Finally there's angel investors, but those aren't typically paying out of the goodness of their heart. They usually want to grow a business that they'll later commercialize. They'll get a great period of time where everything just magically gets paid for, but odds are, they're gonna do something terrible later to monetize.
An obligatory mention that ads don't have to be scummy. That's the norm, yeah, but it's entirely possible to serve only ethical, clearly marked ads that don't utilize deception or are scams. It doesn't make as much money as accepting scummy ads, which is why we usually end up with ads being scummy, but it is an option.
Who's going to see them when everyone here uses adblocks and VPNs? Who's gonna click on them when everyone here is a world-wary anti-consumer? Who's going to buy anything when everyone here knows very well what they want and where to get it?
I'm talking about the possibility of it growing and reaching the larger populous. They do not have adblockers. They will therefore finance the instance. Not for profit, but for sustainability. But even now, there are people here who do not mind small and non-intrusive ads if it's for a non-profit instance. Not everyone here, even now, is a world-wary anti-consumer, whatever that is.
The advertisement model needs to die. No one wants to have their experience corrupted by panels trying to sell you something. We can find other ways to fund the network
although some models are going to be more expensive than others. hosting a reddit clone and a youtube clone require totally different levels of bandwidth and infrastructure
Weren't ads the ruination of Reddit in the first place? When social media companies get hungry for advertising, it's the users who suffer. Not just from the ads themselves, but from the advertisers' expectations for the content on the site to conform to their standards.
4chan runs ads. Pornhub runs ads. They have most certainly said goodbye to a large number of advertisers who were uncomfortable with the content they host.
It became a problem because it meant they were forced to bow down to advertisers instead of leaning into user funding. Discord has leaned into user funding very heavily, but I don't know of any other social media that is more funded by its users than it is by ads and is regularly used/promoted, at least in the US.
no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example
Well I think that's part of the point of the Fediverse: No single server has to scale that much. Sure, the big ones are going to get big and stay big, but no one Lemmy server is ever going to have as many people using it as Reddit does. That means the cost of each instance is going to be tiny in comparison to what Reddit spends to keep one big monolithic site running (which is easily in the millions). Fediverse will distribute users across many instances/platforms which also distributes the cost. Not only do users have many Lemmy instances, they've also got kbin, and mastodon, plus any other platform that joins ActivityPub.
Reddit/Facebook style monolithic sites are not viable. You see time and time again these platforms desperately trying to monetize because it's so expensive to run. Fediverse can have millions and millions of users, but no single entity will have to foot that bill.
So many new users completely missing the point of the Fediverse. We want to avoid having one big instance with one person in control. At that point you may as well name them the CEO.
some people seem not to get the point of "millions of users", which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that.
The point of Lemmy is NOT to have a single instance compete with Reddit! That would just be Reddit V2 then. There just needs to be more instances to distribute the user load more evenly. Running a small/medium sized VPS costs about as much as a Netflix subscription.
Sure, but couldn't you still have a 30 million user community in a single instance? Or would you also like that community to be spread out over multiple instances? Probably not because that would splinter communities. But having such a big community in a single instance, is still hard to host. Expensive. And donations may not suffice.
This is the great thing about the fediverse approach. We can have instances that are ad-support, ad-free ad-free instances that are donation-supported, instances that require paid membership with presumably zippier response times, ad-supported with ad-free paid option, and so on.
Someone who even takes the step into getting into the fediverse is probably using ad blockers for the purposes of security alone on a daily basis. I don't see them disabling it.
I’d probably be fine with Old-Style Internet Ads: A Div that displays a bit of text or a small image that suggests an interesting product for the user, possibly related to the page content they’re viewing.
But new style internet ads demand things like iframes, numerous scripts, user tracking, user anti-tracking circumvention, and attempts to weasel their way out of the small sidebar they’ve been scripted into. If there was any way for an advertising network to ban/blacklist any advertisers that do things like that, or even offer them a limited model for what they can add to a page, I’d be a little more okay with them.
I am very much certain that once there is a lot of users here, corporations will show up to run ads. Then I‘ll go to an instance which defederates from them, cause I‘m not dealing with this.
The point of the fediverse is that hosts can pick their own business model - free, freemium, ad-supported, subscription. Just like e-mail, you sign up with the provider who provides the type of service you think best meets your needs. If they piss you off, you move to a different provider.
If the fediverse demands hosting for millions of users, someone will make a server to host millions.
I personally think "big" instances should focus on user/identity management, while communities live in small groups on small instances. This lets the identity providers include/exclude with much better granularity (compared to the beehaw mess) making the communities much less susceptible to being collateral damage.
Ads is what's ruining everything that's good on the internet. If you have two similar platforms and one is run by ads and one by a subscribtion model the latter is going to give you way better experience.
I'm guessing that ads/sponsored posts would probably take the form of companies setting up their own Lemmy instances and pays to federate with other instances, and my could-be-unpopular opinion is that it's fine as long as it's fair, since if they have to abide by upvotes/downvotes as everybody else it forces the companies to make good contents, and that if they get too annoying/spammy they'll just get defederated or people will vote with their virtual feet and go elsewhere.
And the good thing about this approach is that you can make sure you get real interactions with real people at these companies for tech support, otherwise the ads would be completely useless.
Text is cheap. It doesn't cost a ton of money to run these instances at least not yet, so people can do it as a hobby or with a few supporters.
It does however pay to ask your instance admins what their plans and policies are for moderation, defederating, finances, backups, having a money buffer in case things need to be spun down, and having multiple admins in case of disaster.
The image hosting might cost a bit though. Maybe instances can farm them off to places where storage is cheaper, or have premium membership options that includes image hosting. I would happily pay an instance a small amount to cover the convenience of being able to add images to posts and comments directly.
I think what would be useful would be a transparent system where the instance owners would keep a record of how many users / interaction they're getting and how much it's currently costing.
That way if they say they're supporting 20,000 users and we need a VPS instance that costs X a month for the current number of requests, you can somewhat forecast the need for expansion
I get the idea isn't to make mega servers like Reddit, but if people like the UI / experience of a single instance it's hard to tell them to go elsewhere. Having transparency about actual costs would be useful, you could have a little widget on the sidebar or footer showing how much it currently being donated.
I think the instances themselves don't feel much different (for example the UI for lemmy.world and lemmy.studio is like exactly the same), but I feel like maybe there needs to be some quality of life tools to help a new instance succeed with more ease.
Like it's hard to know that the instance exists, so it'd be nice if the UI makes signing up for one as easy as possible,
One big con at the moment too is it's actually kind of hard for me to find communities in a small instance. The large instances somehow people already added like all of them, so I can search for pretty much all of them. I think to encourage joining new instances, ideally should give the creator an easy way to like just add every single community across different aggregators. Maybe even a bot that just automatically does this so it doesn't have to be updated, or at least give the creator of that instance that option if they so choose
Give easy way to migrate account. For example today I just learned about a website with a list of the kbin servers, and thought maybe I should move from kbin.social to put less strain on it. However, I made my kbin.social account with my gmail, and I prefer to be lazy and just log in through gmail. I can't make a new account on say kbin.chat with that same gmail account actually, so I'd have to use another email account, and I didn't want to do that. Also in my 2 days on kbin, I made a community, and if I just abandon my kbin.social account, I don't know who would be the "mod" of that community now. There's already some data I'd like to not have to start over on
Personally as a uswe I think running ads is not a bad idea, just if I would pay already (through donations for example), I prefer to have the option to show no ads.
I can imagine the current server owners either be decently supported by donations and/or see hosting a lemmy server currently more as a hobby.
sorry, I block all ads by default. if I get popups indicating that I need to whitelist, I block elements until I never see that crap again or the site is unusable, after which I find a different site.
Before the internet (yes, I'm old), it seemed like there was broad opposition to advertising in general. Some eschewed television altogether, while others stuck to pbs and public access only (believe it or not, back then public tv had no ads!). With the rise of the dotcoms came a simultaneous resurgence of the false notion that advertising is essential to "capitalism", by which people really meant " entrepreneurship". Now so many people are ready to accept advertising, believing that we can't have good things without it.
I will never accept advertising as a necessary evil. It is just evil.
I'm there with ya, internet was available to me in ~94 when I was 15. it sure was a simpler time all around - I grew up running around in the forest, barefoot, floating rivers on inner tubes.
I dont hate advertisements - but I'll do everything in my power to avoid viewing them
Instead of ads Lemmy operators should be paid for hosting. Users should be asked for funding on a periodic basis (perhaps a small number of subscribers could fund the entire hosting for all.)
I'd like this to be avoided as much as possible. But I am a bit weary about the fact that even small instances have to copy everything else on the Fediverse and thus will be very strained. Or do they copy the stuff only when their user wants to view it? Not sure how it works.
Because these instances are often run as hobby projects and out of passion, not to be sustainable.
The Fediverse isnt corporate, we're a community and nothing will change that. We don't want to make money, we want to bring back what social media was supposed to be.
Additionally, it has become part of the culture of the Fediverse to regularly remind your peers to donate to your instance, as they're who are running this all for our benefit.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone will do an ad-supported service. Or just do a straight-up subscription service -- I mean, Usenet providers do that. Means that you don't risk having your instance just vanish, someone handles security updates and load issues and so forth. Different models could coexist at different levels of reliability and performance and whatnot.
On the reliability issue, from my very quick skim, my kneejerk reaction is that I do think that the Fediverse might need some improvements in dealing with resillience due to instances going down permanently. As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down. Publish a pubkey prior to an instance failing, and then permit a "transition to a new account" mechanism where a user can prove to the system that they are an older user. Key management -- storing and retaining a private key -- might be a bit of a pain without a third-party app, as I don't know if there's a convenient way to do that in browsers today.
Another might be having some mechanism to deal with node failure. Freenet deals with having a fundamentally-unreliable distributed storage mechanism by having a level of forward error correction and then distributing some redundant data around the network so that it's possible to regenerate a certain amount of lost data when a node leaves the network from the data on remaining nodes.
As it stands, I don't think that lemmy/kbin have something like that. They must retain copies of some of the data -- hence the "The magazine from the federated server may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance" message that kbin shows if I'm looking at a community on lemmy.world from kbin.social. But unless it's cryptographically-signed by lemmy.world, if lemmy.world vanishes forever, kbin.social cannot prove that its copy of data originating from lemmy.world is authentic, so it cannot be made re-available to other lemmy/kbin instances.
Yes something like this should definitely be implemented. Mastodon has the feature of "moving your account" from one instance to another, but I haven't tested it yet. Don't know if it has anything like you mentioned like key management.
As it is, that happens -- due to hardware failure or financial concerns or God knows what -- the accounts aren't available.
One possibility might be providing a pubkey method to prove that a user is legitimately a user on an instance that went down.
This is the one thing that bugs me the most with ActivityPub - identities are tied to instances. Hopefully folks are still working on nomadic identities.
Donation based funding has historically been used amongst the fediverse and is therefore the most likely path forward. I'm also partial to this model as it prevents predatory changes towards increasing ad revenue. We see many content creators and organizations (such as the lemmy devs themselves) utilize donations as a method towards preserving the FOSS spirit of the platform whilst supporting these projects part/full time or just server and maintenance costs.
I am of the opinion that in the long term, donations will also be the best way to preserve Lemmy's independence from profit based oversight by staying ad-free and the instances that step away from this and embrace ads most likely will be the ones that already have stepped away from the spirit of Lemmy by defederating. I have no interest in remaking reddit and many others feel the same so I am more than happy to donate and enjoy other FOSS projects.
Would ads be of much value on a lemmy instance? Almost nobody using lemmy would not be using an ad blocker. And if an instance integrated ads, other instances would have access to their communities without ads unless you do some kind of "native content" scheme where some of your posts are ads which I don't think anyone would tolerate.
I could see maybe sponsorships with locally hosted shout-outs in the sidebar working for some people.
AO3 is a huge website that makes money purely off of donations. They often get like quadruple the amount they ask for every time they ask for money. Wikipedia comes to mind as well, although I'm not sure if they only make money off of the donations.
Instead of donating to a third party service, Lemmy should build in the ability to donate into the website.
I think it's reasonable for some instances, where there's good alignment. There was a thread I replied in a few days back around how/if TTRPG creators(who are mostly small enthusiasts themselves) could advertise in related magazines, and legitimizing that business wouldn't really pose a conflict for the hobby - that's how it was built in the first place! It's just a matter of finding a place for it and defining the technical solutions.
As a general "let in all the advertisers and promise riches for someone" measure, it does cause known problems. There is some freedom to figure out what works in a specific case here, it's not defined top-down since it isn't centralized.
Having companies sponsor magazines (money goes to instance owner) and getting a basic blurb in the sidebar would really not be that obtrusive or annoying, I don't think. Bigger magazines would be a bigger cost on resources, but also more valuable to advertisers.