Comment on We have to solve the money problem!

• rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:

  • Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
  • Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
  • Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
  • Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
  • Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)

  We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.

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  • rumimevlevi@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.

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      • rumimevlevi@lemmings.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time.

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      • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Isn’t elest.io/open-source/lemmy still a thing? Different model from you, though.

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  • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    • Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

    This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

    It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.

    Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

    We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.

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      • gedaliyah@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.

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  • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Let’s get rid of open registration instances

    How?

    Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is stopping them. Some already have

    But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?

    You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.

      What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.

      If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.

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      • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.

        As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.

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• nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.

  They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.

  If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.

    If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.

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  • Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve

    This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?

    I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:

    You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:

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    Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.

    The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.

    You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing

    This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money

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    And then they can simply pay people to do the shit no one wants to.

    The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.

    Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small

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    • Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      they will have to enshittify to stay afloat, like allowing ads into instances, thats the reality if they want to grow.

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      • Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in

        then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place

        but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\

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