Just curious as this is all fun and open till it scales to expensive. What is the lemmy.ca plan to sustain / fund it self?
Constant donation nagging like Wikipedia?
Lemmy.ca runs on donations, It is ultimately up to the admins of each instance to decide how to monetize each instance.
Currently Lemmy.ca costs about 25$/mo to run. Although given all the growth that seems like it’s out of date. You can donate here or here. Tallying up both donations reported values (remember that the donation site probably takes a cut) the instance makes 150 a month from 30 users, so we are more than set for the next little while.
Make that 31 😉
I rounded out of laziness so you are actually the 30th :D
Ok now 31! Lol
Hey I wonder what number I am. Do we count as charter members?
lol!
I’ve never used those services. Do they take PayPal? I’ve only used Patreon of these types of things.
I can’t speak to opencollective but liberapay does.
yes, donations is my current plan.
someone mentioned in a different thread to contact CIRA and see if they will help like they did with mstdn.ca. I haven’t yet looked into that yet.
Is there a document or post outlining how much an instance owner would be required to pay based on instance traffic?
yeah, that’s tough to say. on this instance, since I’ve moved to a new host (about 17 days ago), we’re at almost 1TB of traffic, if that helps at all?
Unlikely; every time a new version comes out, the data:traffic ratio will change.
For instance, they’re currently working to replace websockets. When that’s done, it should decrease data use while increasing responsiveness.
When the donations run out can we just put up ads? It would be the same reddit experience, but without the autocratic company trying to squeeze the money out of it.
I don’t want “the same reddit experience,” because the reddit experience sucks. That’s why I’m here instead of caving in and using the official reddit app. I wouldn’t mind some form of advertising, but annoying advertising I have to manually scroll past is how you get people to use ad-blockers and alternatives.
Edit: Like, I see sites change their backgrounds to ads, and that, to me, is perfectly fine because it doesn’t affect my experience. Ads like that would be much nicer.
there’s no built in way to add ads in lemmy, even if I wanted to, and I highly doubt the devs would ever add that as a feature (just a guess).
Product placement/sponsorships.
The great thing about Lemmy though is you can just go to another instance.
Many of us donate monthly. That’s something that comes with the realization that there we’re paying for the service one way or another. It’s the subscription fee to having these services.
For what it’s worth, donating annually or every 3/6 months etc is a lot more efficient with transaction fees, especially if you’re giving $1-2.
True, which is why Liberapay and probably others bundle the transactions and execute them at less frequent intervals. That said the commitment that allows for budgeting and projections is important.
That is really cool, I didn’t know that!
How do recurrent donations work? On Liberapay, donations are funded in advance. You have control over when and how much you pay. Sending more money at once usually results in a lower percentage of transaction fees. We will notify you whenever a donation needs to be renewed. If you’ve opted for automatic renewals, then we will attempt to debit your card or bank account as agreed.
Unfortunately, my instance uses Ko-Fi which I don’t think has a system like that - they only offer one time and monthly.
It might still be better to have couple of people subscribing for $2/mo than getting one submit larger donations less often. Another option is to do funding drives with transparent numbers but that is more work. As a user I prefer to pay an inconsequential amount of money monthly that fades in the background of bills. That way I know “I did my part” and I can stop thinking about it. If I can afford more than an inconsequential amount, I’d just contribute more.
Also providing more payment options even if they’re not as privacy-friendly could be a good thing. Especially if you outline that. E.g.
Privacy-friendly:
- X
- Y
Traditional:
- A
- B
As a user, I might opt to go with a traditional option because it’s much easier to do. Chances are I have PayPal or Google Pay, etc.
Subscription options should be as frictionless as possible. Lemmy developers did good with adding Patreon since many people who understand the small subscription model use it.
My perspective is, I pay $12 dollars or whatever a month for Spotify. I spend at least as much time using services like this as I do that. So it’s very much worthwhile to me to contribute to something like this, particularly considering it’s not trying to serve me ads.
So, the thing about the federated system, is that the server loads are distributed among the different instances that are run by individuals. This way, no one instance gets too big to afford to sustain itself.
But yeah, basically donations are what any instance will likely be run off of. I’m sure there will be people trying to profit off of it somehow, by charging people for accounts, maybe, at some point. Or running ads, etc. But as it is right now, I believe the idea is to have this system be free and sustained through donations.
*edit: The best way to get an answer to a question is to confidently post an incorrect answer and let someone correct you. :)
It’s not quite that straightforward. There’s some non linear network effects – as more communities emerge, each instance is likely to be pulling content from more and more communities. Thus the storage costs along will baloon, and the instance to instance communication will baloon, but not necessarily scaling with user count. It’s not likely to be scalable in the long term, if my math is correct.
It’d be like each subreddit having to make a copy of the entire reddit database, over the network, to participate in reddit. Works on a small scale. Fails badly if the community is too large.
Does it have to be that way? Excuse my lack of fediverse and general networking knowledge, but couldn’t a user instead retrieve the data directly from the instance a post is hosted on without their instance needing to interact with it at all?
I see how there’s limited scalability in the example you provide, but I feel like it shouldn’t be necessary for each instance to make their own copy of things and rather have the user get the data directly from the host instance.
Server load is a funny thing, I suspect if your instance hosts many busy communities that your instance is going to have increased resource needs quickly. While search and feeds are shared each community is owned by a specific instance correct?
What does “federated” mean? I’ve seen the word everywhere but with no explanation.
It means there’s a bunch of different instances and they can share stuff with each other. Here’s the best explanation I’ve seen so far (it has some extraneous info tho) https://lemmy.world/post/149743
So to further my consern it looks like I am right and that load from other servers is already crushing some servers and forcing them to disconnect / de federate. https://lemmy.ca/post/681826
Scaling of the platform and the servers WILL be an issue. It sounds like the more external servers users here subscribe to, the more LOAD there will be on THIS instance, especially if those external subscriptions are high traffic.
