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We have to solve the money problem!

⁨130⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/we_have_to_solve_the_money_problem_

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  • blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I talked to Jerry and here is my interview: blenderdumbass.org/…/clarifying_costs_of_running_…

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  • jerry@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.

    I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.

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    • Rrrurboatlibad@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Thank you

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    • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Time to start putting ads in.

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      • nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.

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      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I support ads.

        Oh, calm down. I don’t support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.

        And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.

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  • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I’d be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can’t sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we’ve used for 100s of hours.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.

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    • pdqcp@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      You can actually do it using USDC (USD stablecoin) on Ethereum via Base for free:

      www.coinbase.com/en-br/…/zero-fee-usdc

      Most people think of crypto as a scam, but there are actual useful products being built on Ethereum, and this is a great illustration on where it is a useful tool

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      • qaz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        I think something like this is going to be a necessity to make a federates video platform work.

        What is the transaction fee of USDC?

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  • Steve@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The only real option is to charge people.
    Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to host a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.

    There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.

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    • ocassionallyaduck@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.

      I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.

      This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.

      Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
        • This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they’ve accessed in the federation.
        • Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
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      • Steve@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.

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      • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I think that would just be a different instance.

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      • Kierunkowy74@piefed.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Something similar is available for PeerTube:
        - Platform redundancy by P2P, and
        - offload of transcoding and transcription to Remote Runners

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    • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that

      There are a lot of people who aren’t that luck. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it’s their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.

      video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?…

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

        There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

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  • SorteKanin@feddit.dk ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I’ve managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that’s my guess at least.

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  • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.

    Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server. They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day. Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding more stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, adding non-essentials more decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook. They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event. They also have one corporate backer for its instance, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.

    Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.

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    • Tywele@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wouldn’t mind ads like these.

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  • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

    Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?

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    • blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨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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      • nulluser@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨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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    • jerry@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.

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    • tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can’t afford to pay for it.

      On a smaller scale, that’s not much of a problem. I’m glad I can host for some people who don’t have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don’t and that’s fine as well.

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  • dangling_cat@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.

    Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.

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  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven’t even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the “server” is a hive of users’ computers all sharing the load? I’m a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area. Comments?

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    • blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone

      We have to think about that a lot of people on the fediverse today ( and that number only grow the more people join ) that are normies. They expect it work the same exact way anything else works. And they won’t know or care to know any of the underlying technical things about it.

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    • TeddE@lemmy.world ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Personally I think self-hosting (Docker containers and stuff) would be a good solution, but for the Fediverse that would mean making a ‘family size’ edition of the server software.

      I imagine if it became a common hobby and every geek interested supported ~4-25 friends, it might work.

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  • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    @jerry@infosec.exchange , I’m sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?

    If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don’t you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?

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    • hisao@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.

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      • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Storage. In the video he says that backups alone costs $500/month.

        Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.

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  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what’s going on with the donated money.

    Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

    I don’t know if it’s the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it’s not clear I just hold my money.

    But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially “user donations”. For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don’t think that’s going to change as most people don’t have that much disposable income anyway.

    I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don’t get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as “less centralized”, truly decentralized model should be p2p. I’ve said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it’s a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.

    I think a model that the burden is smaller and mor spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.

    Also I take the change to put up a critique on domain costs, it’s not much, but it’s part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don’t know if there’s any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.

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    • LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

      If you believe he’s spending $5k/mo to run the server, even if you send him $20 and he blows it on blackjack and hookers, it means he has to spend $20 of his bj/h money on the server. So I don’t really see an issue. Does that make sense?

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      • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        The transparency is needed to know if the server is actually costing $5000

        Not that the server cost only $500 and the rest go to cocaine and hookers

        I don’t need to keep track of my bill precisely, what I want is budget transparency.

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    • dil@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Yep, cant even see how much they got a month or anything like that as far as im aware, there are some piracy sites where the donation number stays at like 200/350 goal forever and it feels like you really never kniw if they’re just making bank and pretending to be in need lol

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  • suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.

    what is so difficult here?

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    • suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      omg and do NOT do fireside chats like you are a bunch of dickhead executives. no wonder you need to beg for donations.

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    • Maalus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      Probably that people have jobs, families and lives. Otherwise, why haven’t you already started a nonprofit that does that and donates to them?

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      • suswrkr@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Everyone has jobs, families, and lives. What is your point?

        I did start a nonprofit this year, electronica.repair

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  • ragingHungryPanda@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket.

    Wtf!?

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    • Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that

      There are a lot of people who aren’t that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it’s their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.

      video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?…

      For the host question, it’s at 34:11

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      • jerry@infosec.pub ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Hey all, Jerry here (from the interview). Happy to answer any questions.

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  • mesitoispro@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Bro, what fucking project ever solves “the money problem?”

    As soon as they get more, they spend more and then it’s back to square one.

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  • nokturne213@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

    Image

    I joined my instance’s patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.

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    • Eyekaytee@aussie.zone ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      He missed a bit:

      they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance … or go somewhere else

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  • mesitoispro@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Why the fuck should we be paying admins to have control over our data and be able to arbitrarily ban us because they feel like it?

    No. Their reward for having users is that they’re in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid, but I don’t expect most people to realize it.

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    • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      No. Their reward for having users is that they’re in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid,

      You DO realize that not everyone works to attain power over other people, right?

      but I don’t expect most people to realize it.

      The reason people don’t realize that site owners’ reward for forking over half a salary in hosting costs for some nebulous power to hold other people in their clutching fists and cackle maniacally is because that’s not the motivator here.

      I look forward to when you can see that.

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      • mesitoispro@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Bro, why do you just trust these people when they tell you what their expenses are?

        Even if some dumbass is spending $5000/month (which sounds like a load of bullshit if you’re not a moron) to host a fucking lemmy instance, why do you trust that they need to spend that money in order to provide the instance?

        Have you noticed how most people buy things they don’t need just because they can? If not, then you need more life experience and it makes sense that you would take admin’s word at face value when they try to sucker you out of money.

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    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Fuck you :)

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      • mesitoispro@ttrpg.network ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Expected response from useful idiots.

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    • Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      What is “our data” in the case of Lemmy. Specifically.

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    • Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      thats because its thier site, instance they get set rules like it. just like reddit bans you force certain things. dont use the site then.

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  • hisao@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don’t hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don’t do another one until I get the feeling “it’s been a while”.

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    • rglullis@communick.news ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Wrong Blender, my friend…

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      • hisao@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        I’m talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.

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