People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
I see a lot of people willing to support the servers, but little conversation on how to support the admins. I support a living (and competitive) wage for folks, and don't think instance admins should be doing this work for free. If you set up your own tiny instance for your family, sure, I bet you won't be charging your family for it, but a huge instance with constant needs and a bunch of strangers is a totally different thing. Just donating toward server costs does not allow admins to pay their personal bills, while they put in hours of work to keep this place going. So, I appreciate you for including "admins" in the support needs!
I know a lot of people hate it but I wonder if crypto/digital donation would work. All you would need is a separate wallet setup to pay the host every month. Maybe even have a graph/chart showing how much is in the wallet vs how much the monthly bill is.
I’m dirt poor but I’ve donated to Wikipedia at least three times now. I use that website so often, it’s changed my life.
Beehaw has a periodic financial update. It would be great if each instance had a similar kind of update so that we can understand what is needed and where to help.
This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you're not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
Better yet, be their partner.
That's a bit much, I'm not looking to get into a relationship here. /s
What about... comrade?
You're right, what am I talking about. Updates relationship status: In a Federationship
Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.
This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they're much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.
You don't want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.
We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.
Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community
Nope. You're the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.
Good to see it making a comeback.
To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:
"A beginning is a very delicate time."
What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive "consumers" we've all been corporately groomed to be.
I think more instances are the answer because this activity can't be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc
This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don't know what that looks like.
This is open source. We are neither products nor customers - we are all test subjects.
It's like hanging out at a friend's house. Follow their rules.
One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.
Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.
I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.
Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.
While I understand what you're getting at, users can be viewed as "the product" if they are contributing content (posts, comments, votes, and other forms of engagement) and "the customer" if they are consuming this content in any way.
Without content or readers there would be no Lemmy, just like for Wikipedia with no editors or readers there would be no purpose for that site either. The terms "product" and "customer" aren't intrinsically related to monetary value.
I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?
You're one of the awesome people hosting the site, of course.
Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!
This is so sweet and wholesome that I might faint from a sugar OD!
...I'm sorry, but blind positivism won't get you, Lemmy and nothing else to anywhere. Nothing is perfect neither free of "predatory capitalism" -- one day, you will "be the product". And there is nothing you can do about it, because this world ain't a fairy tale where we've got fairies flying around and giving us anything we want -- we need money. And lots of it.
Shout at me, swarm at me with negative downvotes like it's the best thing you can do (which probably is), but this is the real world, giving it to you with a couple words, fair and square.
What?
I see your point but there have been community-run message boards funded by donations in the past. I doubt Lemmy will replicate Reddit's scale.
I think part of the beauty of the Fediverse is that nobody definitively holds any cards. Don't like Lemmy.ml? Fine, setup Lemmy.world. Don't like that one? There are other options! The ability for folks to interact with one another without having to generate new accounts is a major benefit. There are still some growing pains, but I think we're on a pretty solid path.
My only concern is about excessive consolidation making de-federation more feasible and leading to high cost pressures (I know Lemmy.ca admin mentioned their costs and it was growing quite a bit). We have some folks looking at ways to address this and to possibly bring improvements to Lemmy code with respect to scalability. Fingers crossed!
I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.
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