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Fediverse @lemmy.world Dame @lemmy.ml

Fediverse sustainability

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.

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  • 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.

      See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing

      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.

      • @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.

      • 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.

    • 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.

    • Point where I said we should run ads

  • 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.

  • At the end of the day, there are three ways to finance a server.

    1. 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.
    2. 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.
    3. 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.

      • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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.

    • 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.

  • 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.

      • 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.

  • 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:

    1. The lack of software collaboration and reusable and composable software
    2. 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.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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

  • Hmm. Does this mean that it's expensive to run this whole Fediverse thing and that the money is running out?

  • I'll tell you what will make it unsustainable, getting banned "disagreeing" for criticizing and questioning the Terms of Service: https://kbin.social/m/RedditMigration/t/554307/Just-wanted-a-warning-Lemmy-World-is-perhaps-worse-than-reddit

    • Good thing you already put just "Disagreeing" in quotes.

    • Wow, what the heck. I’m sorry that happened to you. Obviously, admins/mods are within their rights to enforce their rules however but it shouldn’t be in such a way. I hope you find a better experience elsewhere.

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