777
So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
(lemmy.world)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
777 points (100.0% liked)
No Stupid Questions
36169 readers
443 users here now
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
But even non-profits have costs that they need to cover somehow. If they don’t, they’re still not sustainable.
You ask for donations. I'm donating to my instance for instance.
Yes, but that's not the point.
The point is to keep the servers relatively small so that the non profits can keep breaking even on nothing but donations, even with an influx of new users entering the fediverse.- bigger instances should ideally only be trying to grow when their donations are more than covering the costs. (That being said I wouldn't be surprised if the bigger instances started having problems what with their seeming ability to continually accept new users without closing once)
In the grand scheme of things the bigger instances having 20K users isn't a whole lot, and can be done using smaller servers - the thing with social media is that usually only about 20-25% of people are actually "active" - the rest are lurking or dead accounts and maybe occasionally commenting.
The smaller instances (like the one Im on) have anywhere from 1-1000 users and are highly unlikely to fall outside the range of the low cost of a little bit higher than a hobbyist side project, and what with the tendency for smaller instances to have more % of their members also be donators probably never have to fear running out of money
It really only becomes an exponentially expensive problem when you reach twitter and Reddit levels of users on the same instance - as you end up needing more and more expensive custom load balancing and caching solutions in order to keep up with the demand - basically it's more sustainable for a few thousand people to support the costs of a 1000 instances with 100,000 total members than it is for a company to try to make a profit off of a single monolithic structure supporting the same number of users.
The fediverse splits this load across servers, even segregates it. There are areas of the fediverse that I will never see due to a lack of direct connection through the nature of how your feed works, this helps as not everything is needlessly routed through a single point.
Also Wikipedia faces the same issues and still manages to get through - sure they put up banners asking for donations when margins are getting in to what they consider the "danger zone" but usually the danger zone is more than what's required.
I'm wondering whether I would do good or bad if I host my own Lemmy instance for myself, to lower my impact on other instances.
Non-profit organizations still take in money to pay for their expenses. That doesn't negate their non-profit status.