No Stupid Questions

The fediverse is not a single database or server. It's a protocol and standard that's distributed by design. The fediverse as a whole cannot be centrally monetized, just like email can't be monetized. A single provider could potentially choose to try to monetize either by requiring a subscription or showing ads, exactly like email providers do, but if you ever feel like they've stopped providing a good service you can just switch to another instance just like you can switch to another email provider.

Unlike a centralized service like Reddit, you're not locked into a monopoly. Switching instances does not lock you out of the system as a whole, just like you can still receive email if you switch to another provider. With Reddit you can only access the platform through Reddit because it's a closed source centralized monopoly.

One thing the fediverse seems to lack as far as I can tell is a way to link accounts, like how you can set up forwarding with email, which helps you switch providers. But the protocol and standard is still being developed so maybe that's something that can happen in the future

No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.

The concept of the Fediverse is horizontal rather than vertical growth - i.e. More smaller instances rather than increasing the capacity of the larger ones. We're also seeing that Lemmy currently only scales to a certain degree. Right now, most instances are either covered by their admin because they're so small that the cost is manageable or instances are setting up donations.

It's conceivable that a business would set up an instance and charge for it - but I think it unlikely. A year town the road, though, who knows?

Open-source projects have always been sustainable by donations. Just look at Wikipedia; it's been around for 22 years. Linux has been around for even longer.

If lemmy.world ever sold out, I'd probably just move to reddthat.com. Problem solved.

How many hobbiests running miniature train sets in their garage have monetized those train sets? How many backyard gardeners sell their crops.

In most cases people who choose to develop and administrate an instance of their own are largely just hobbiests of another type. Sure it costs them some money. Many hobbies cost money, it doesn't stop people from building things or growing things for fun.

Wikipedia is probably the most important thing on the internet fight now. It also needs some amount of servers, many crawlers scan it daily, I assume its a shitton of users and logins and API hits and what not. And still it survives on donations alone.

Eventually lemmy is not a streaming services with videos and and a lot of bandwidth. Its just text and people connecting. So I assume you dont need massive servers and shit.

Surprised no one else mentioned this... the answer is negative many months (or years?), most are Mastodon instances and probably not many people are familiar with most of those instances tho.

There was a fairly serious controversy months back when mastodon.cloud was purchased (if I remember correctly) by the same company that owns pawoo.net and another large Japanese Mastodon instance, the company is for-profit. Several right-wing shithole instances obviously have ads and are for-profit. Also there are a few instances owned/operated by for-profit companies, Medium immediately comes to the top of my mind.

Problem is a fairly significant portion of Mastodon admins I know were so staunchly against anything touching for-profit companies within a 12-ft stick that they immediately defederated from all of the said for-profit company affiliated instances...

To answer the second question... I don't know. Again, the larger Mastodon instances (over 10,000 users each) I'm aware of seem to do just fine on user donations now, but the concept of profit comes every now and then. Paid moderators/admins was also something to keep in mind for this topic.

I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can't imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.

The big difference with Lemmy is that it's not really a service, it's a open protocol and standard, like email, or http. The service itself is provided by distributed instances that adhere to the protocol. Like those protocols, no one company has been able to get a monopoly on it. Some have taken over a lot of it, like Google with Gmail, or cloudflare, but if you don't want to work with them there are a ton of other options you can go with, and you will not be locked out of the system if you do.

Reddit was a centralized closed source system so if you don't have a Reddit account then you are locked out of the system completely.

Lemmy is decentralized so no one instance has or can gain a monopoly. If you want to break ties with one instance you can just switch to another one and still participate with it and the rest of the fediverse.

Not only does that give you choice in a worst case scenario, it also keeps all the instances on their toes because they don't have dictatorial control over their users.

Spez's fatal miscalculation was that he thought he had user lock in, but unlike other social networks where it's your only option to keep in contact with your real life friends, or it's the only platform your favorite creator posts on, they had neither. Almost all accounts were not connected to your real life and posts were mostly links to other platforms. Very few creators had Reddit as their sole posting platform. The interactions were ephemeral and superficial. Dropping Reddit was the easiest service I ever had to drop.

Besides all the discussion of nonprofits and donations, fedi server hosts have way less overhead. They're not generally trying to profit, so they only need to break even (or run a deficit small enough to deal with out of pocket). A corporation is trying to give 6 or 7 digit salaries to CEOs and/or shareholders. So they need to extract more than the cost of hosting.

The Fediverse as a whole cannot be monetised, censored, or taken over by hostile entities.

Individual instances can, but they are only part of the whole and not the whole thing, so instances of Elon Musk or Steve Huffman simply cannot happen on the same scale.

As a fun fact of the day, Wikipedia subsists entirely on charity, so it's very possible to run things using this model if you provide enough value and transparency for people.

I’m going to tell you a secret…. Yes.

All those things could happen. Some people could run a site that has ads. Some people could run a site that charges a membership. Some sites could have a Patreon membership. Some sites could do subscriptions….

And some sites could be completely free.

The funny thing is, because of the federation, no one will be harmed. Let’s say I startup a site and all I do is pass through the cost of the site to each user. No profit, just what it costs to maintain the server is shared among the members.

Is that unreasonable?