this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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The hard truth is that long term, we likely need another way besides donations to keep the ecosystem alive.
I would like to see some numbers first. Donations work fine for mastodon.
Edit : here are mastodon.world financials https://blog.mastodon.world/
Donations seem to work fine for Wikipedia as well. Same with internet archive. We should not underestimate the willingness of people to support a good cause.
It's almost like people are willing to spend money for a good cause, when they are not constantly being pressured and scammed into it.
Maybe something like signals donator badge would be a better solution
I would love to see a social media network run under this model, and I think lemmy, kbin, etc are great candidates for that. The decentralized nature of the fediverse allows costs and user load to get spread out to other instances, vs. something centralized which concentrates all that on one org/person. I feel that makes a donation only system much more attainable
This really needs to be higher.
Running a Mastodon or Lemmy server is surprisingly cheap. With some specific tweaks and rules (esp. hosting images and video elsewhere), it can get even cheaper.
If your only goal is to break even, then it's amazingly easy. Roughly 1 of every 20 users contributing $1/month. Adjust the numbers as you see fit.
Or a single, non-datamined ad at the top of the page.
Looks like donations work surprisingly well with the current userbase and current expenses. The projects on opencolective are doing quite well.
Lets just hope this stays that way for a while.
I doubt its sustainable that way forever though if more reddit users and subreddits migrate. So if donations arent enough anymore in the future, I hope they choose something like awards instead of flooding the site with ads, analytics or paywals.
So when scaling up
You expect that : costs per user rise and donations per user drop?
I expect that: costs per user drop, donations per user stay the same, and external subsidies rise.
Basically yes, but I also assume the cost per users drops/stays the same
I think the next ppl joining are mostly teens who dont consider donating,but would consider occasionally buying something like awards
I doubt external subsidies can cover the missing donations.
Edit: Also I assume ppl in their early 20s are more likely to buy awards than donate.
And even then there could be donated vs award servers.
I prefer to focus on the donated ones.
It was a bit mean/dishonest from me to frame costs for you.
my guess of dounations just does not match yours.
I assume you that awards are optional for each server.
How would you determine if awards are enabled? The server of the community or the server where the account was created?
You do not, awards do not propogate to other servers.
I'm anti awards and status. donations on feel good works good enough to cover the expenses.
Or maybe some people just can't imagine how this could work without being centered around money.
Lemmy has been around for years. New instances are popping up as new users come in. So far, I haven't seen an instance suffering from lack of funds, but others being funded for months ahead, some even donating excess funds to Lemmy devs.
All while topics like these pop up every other day. For me, it looks like catastrophization. Seeking solutions for problems which do not exist (yet? Not even sure about that).
I dont expect a decentralised platform to be profitable and also think donations are better than in-app purchases.
But I dont want big instances to suddenly turn off because they cant afford it anymore or the development being behind so much we loose users to missing features.
Looking at the donation pages of lemmy instances there are enough donations for now but it is good to have a plan B for in case we get flooded by users not willing to donate so this platform survives long term. That plan B should be as least Invasive as possible,so no ads,analytics or paywall. Thats why I suggested something that is completely cosmetic.
I think a good start before all of that would be for struggling instances to tell their user base that they are struggling.
Not going to lie, awards like that would probably make me start looking for another new platform again. I don't want that part of reddit, personally. I want comments that are there to be there, not comments that are only there to get the most positive feedback. For me, doing this would take lemmy further away from being an open forum, and move it closer towards being a lame popularity contest. I can only see the same jokes so many times.