Fediverse sustainability
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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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.