Comment on Will you be willing to pay for using Twitter?
rglullis@communick.news 1 year agoI’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…
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.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s unfortunate, and doesn’t bode well for the growth of this platform.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
Yes, and this is why I’ve been saying for months already that if we really want to have a viable alternative to shit services we get from Big Tech, we need to start putting our money where our collective mouth is.
RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That’s a tough hill to climb. The internet grew on the largesse of individuals who contributed time and financial support to smaller endeavors, whether it be software or a website. It’s going to be all but impossible to get people to pay for it when even big services like Facebook are free, that’s the conundrum and why ad revenue and personal profile mining is used to fill the hole. Unfortunately costs have risen sharply alongside bandwidth demands, so one can’t run a basement server without bottlenecking on size or costs long before reaching critical mass for a community - and that’s what you mentioned in regards to lemmy.
Like I said…above my pay grade. I hope there’s some way a distributed network like Lemmy can succeed, I really enjoy what it’s becoming. Maybe a hub-and-spoke system will be the final form…big instances supported by more commercial means and smaller instances run by individuals and private funds.
rglullis@communick.news 1 year ago
And to go back to your original response: isn’t that at least worth of some appreciation? Do you need to wait for the network to grow to start supporting it now by subscribing to a provider that costs $10/year (less than a dollar per month)?