I already donate to Mastodon development, and to the Mastodon server I’m on. It’s a good reminder to donate to the Lemmy server I’m on too.
Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
For those that are saying “no” because it’s Musk: would you be willing to pay to your account on Lemmy, Mastodon, or any other social network that you happen to use?
SeriousBug@infosec.pub 1 year ago
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Good for you, but I specifically asked if you would join a server that charged from all users.
Also, if you don’t mind me asking: how much are you contributing, and what if I told you that it would cost you a lot less to sign up to a professionally managed instance than whatever it is you are giving away each month?
OhTheMoose@lemm.ee 1 year ago
It’s tough because we’ve had “free” for so long of so many services. But I honestly think yes, as long as it was something very low like $5/month at most.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
What if I tell you that for $5/month you can have a Mastodon account and bring 9 more of your friends?
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
No because it would exclude all the interesting people, I’d much rather donate to keep a door open for all.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
it would exclude all the interesting people
Are all “interesting people” so cash strapped that they wouldn’t be able to afford a $10/year membership?
Anyway, what if I told you that my instance provides “group-based” billing? You could, e.g, get a 10-account package for $5/month and give access to 9 other people there.
I would still try to come up with some form of vouch or sponsorship-based system, where the paying members get to approve non-paying members if they have a backing sponsor.
donate to keep a door open for all.
Donation-based instances are not sustainable. You can see that already with Mastodon. They used to be able to get enough funds to even support upstream projects, now they are invite-only. Turns out that “keeping the door open for all” makes the operating costs rise faster than the revenue from donations.
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Interesting people barely have time to pop onto Twitter every now and then, they’re not going to bother if it costs money
And I guess we’ll see which system ends up bearing fruit, I think we’re already seeing the capitalist walled garden model falter, I suspect your more collectivist model won’t have the momentum to replace it but while the commons might trip and start with a dozen different stumbles the sheer force of its ever growing ubiquity will carry it through.
Especially as hardware continues to get cheaper and software more efficient, hosting a few thousand users on a federated server is already fairly trivial, its only going to get easier the more hurdles are removed through innovation and tech creep.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
In terms of costs, the predominant factor is storage, which does not go away and is ever increasing. But anyway the problem of instances with thousands of users is not the cost of hardware, but the labor involved with moderation, security, support…
charonn0@startrek.website 1 year ago
A one time fee? Perhaps. But not an ongoing subscription.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Why? This is not a one-off cost. You wouldn’t be paying for a product that you bought once and can be used indefinitely. Software needs to be maintained, data needs to be stored, bits need to transported, mods need to be paid for their ongoing work, etc.
Mind you, I am not talking about price levels of a Netflix or Twitter Blue subscription. I am talking about a much lower price point. $10/year would be more than enough for me to make hosting a large instance a sustainable venture, which would even let me keep my pledge of giving 20% of the profits to the development teams of the upstream projects.
charonn0@startrek.website 1 year ago
I didn’t interpret the question as pertaining to ongoing costs.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Well, the discussion was about Twitter charging a subscription so I thought that was implied.
You are right though that having a system where simply paying to signup would already help alleviate some of the problems with spammers and bots.
EngineerGaming@feddit.nl 1 year ago
I effectively pay to use my IRC, XMPP and email, since I rent a VPS. But that payment earns me much more pleasant usage experience (in case of my IRC bouncer) and a lot of cotrol over my servers in case of the latter two. So while paying a subscription feels a bit bad, I think it’s worth it.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
We can’t expect everyone else to self-host. The question is, what would be the most viable solution for a better (ad free, Surveillance Capitalism free) Internet that can work at scale?
sir_reginald@lemmy.world 1 year ago
small communities of self-hosters that offer the services to those who don’t possess the knowledge to do it themselves. These communities would self-host federated protocols (eg XMPP) so people can interact with others no matter which server they use.
Ideally maintained through users donations. If you want to be less idealistic, maybe small co-ops which charge a reasonable monthly/annual fee and provide free services for those who can’t really afford to pay.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
A bit too vague. Please:
- Define what the number of people in the average “small community”.
- Define “Reasonable monthly/annual fee”.
- Define what would be the cut-off point to “can’t afford to pay”.
The reason that I am asking you to be specific is that there is a good chance that professional providers can be more efficient than any “community-based” solution. We can have hundreds/thousands of independent professional service providers, each serving around 100-500k people, which would make a sustainable and healthy market. On the other hand, I sincerely doubt that we would be able to serve the 2 billion people on e.g Instagram by having millions of “community based” instances of Pixelfed.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 year ago
Donations. Wikimedia proves that some people will want to donate if they find something useful.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
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The operational costs and usage patterns of wikipedia are completely different from a social media website.
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Donations only “work” if you count all the labor done by volunteers as free. The Wikimedia Foundation might be swimming in cash, but the mods and editors don’t see a penny out of it.
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AWittyUsername@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I would yes. If it was a reasonable price and guaranteed that my data wouldn’t be monetised.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
DreBeast@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No. With the current model of social media selling advertising space, user data, and now subscription fees. No, I don’t think I should have to contribute directly from my pocket to these mega media giants.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
I am not talking about the media giants, existing or yet to exist. I am talking about someone providing access to a subscriber-only Lemmy or Mastodon instance, that could be well federated, and professionally managed and moderated.
DreBeast@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No, I don’t think a subscriber-only based model would work. Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already, but what I imagine is the exorbitant cost of running a popular site.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Seems so simple that somebody would have tried it already
Today you are one of the lucky 10 thousand: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/App.net
cost of running a popular site.
I know for a fact that I can run an instance with 15k users and if each one paid $10/year I could make enough to make a living, hire someone to help with moderation and would let me have time to contribute back to the codebase and work on more fediverse projects.
The beauty of this is that I don’t need to have a “huge” site or a monopoly in the market. Other developers could do something similar, due to federation there could be space even for collaboration and/or expansion into other segments.
All we need is to get more people to understand that paying $10/year for something they used to have “for free” is a lot better than having your data exploited.
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I think I’d pay for Lemmy and Firefish. I like them both a lot. Not like a lot, but a tiny annual subscription fee.
If they had lifetime memberships like Livejournal did that would be cool.
Wouldn’t give Elon the lice from my hair though, in the words of the great Maria Callas about her mother.
emax_gomax@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I don’t think either are really active enough to justify a cost and a payment restriction would just worsen that. I do think lemmy should be supported because the whole concept is what reddit and twitter should’ve been to begin with.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
tiny annual subscription fee.
I’m not hosting Firefish (yet), but I do have $10/year plans for Lemmy and Mastodon. Is that within your idea of “tiny fee”?
BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Absolutely. Thanks for replying, please host Firefish, it’s awesome.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
To be 100% honest, I think that those that have a very specific server in mind would be better off by running their own instance, which I also do on Communick but still need to add Firefish to the list.
For the “basic” access, what I’d like to have is only one “single” instance that can “speak” Activity Pub, and then just serve different frontends that can provide the different functionality. This would IMNSHO make more sense because then people could have one single account regardless if they want to do microblogging, share pictures or talk on a forum like Lemmy.
CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 1 year ago
[deleted]rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
This way, you end up paying a lot more than the cost of an yearly subscription, and I am not just saying that because of the cost to rent the server or the electricity to run one at home. It’s the cost of your time as well doing admin duties that can be seen as a hobby for you but for most people is just another unpaid job that they’d rather outsource.
CaptainAniki@lemmy.flight-crew.org 1 year ago
[deleted]rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Please explain? I’m not saying that what you are doing is a bad idea, I’m just saying that you might enjoy the process of self-hosting but the majority of people simply just want a worry-free solution.
sucricdrawkcab@lemmy.world 1 year ago
The only thing that would get me to do it is for sports. It would have to have the games, shows, commentary nonsense and be able to live chat with other fans /players. A full experience of sports. Outside of that not a chance.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
In my dream world, every basketball or football team (american or the real one) would have its own Mastodon/Peertube instance and fans would sign up to a monthly subscription which would give them exclusive benefits, guaranteed prices for tickets (to kill the secondary market) and maybe even voting rights for larger decisions.
In my crazy dream world, sport teams would cut the middlemen and stop selling broadcast rights and broadcast everything direct to viewer. The tech already lets us have that, it’s just that the whole thing is already quite profitable for the top execs so they don’t really care about making it more accessible.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No. Not today at any rate. I probably would have supported a subscription for Reddit 5-8 years ago. The community and content was better. Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon hasn’t caught up to that level yet so I don’t see a point in paying for that. Facebook has gone full stupid - they should pay me for all the data mining they use me and my connections for. I rarely use FB for the social aspect anymore, I belong to many hobby and interest groups on it and use it more like a forum than a “highlight reel of my life” thing.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Isn’t that a chicken-and-egg problem? If all the other alternatives are crap but can survive because of their deep pockets, how can we ever expect the Fediverse to grow without supporting regardless of its current size?
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s above my pay grade. I honestly don’t know. However, I’ll offer that Lemmy instances are somewhat analogous to the hobbyist or special interest forums of yesteryear. A “webring” of sorts. Smaller, cheaper, manageable by dedicated individuals…
They’re not massive and centralized servers requiring all that goes with operating and maintaining them. Ad injection, legal teams, CEOs to pay…the fediverse is a completely different animal compared to big social media. It exists because of lots of little “pockets” and not the deep pockets of centralized social media.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
I’d would hope that was the case with Lemmy, but it seems that the majority of people that moved are just going to the largest instances and trying to replicate what they had on Reddit.
For Mastodon, there are indeed a good number of servers run by a small group of friends who simply don’t care about its cost, but it’s getting pretty clear that any instance with more than 1000 active users is simply not sustainable on donations alone. Every month there is a new instance closing down because the admins realized that the cost per user are growing faster than the donation base.