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.
As long as we don't allow capitalist corporate greed to ruin the Fediverse like it has ruined (and will continue to ruin) practically everything.
Honestly, we really don't know. mastondon.world and lemmy.world are run by donations and that's worked so far. Ruud and his folks have been pretty upfront about their finances.
The general temperament I've gotten is people around here are opposed to a corporate like monetization. I agree with that. Usually, at least what I've observed, is that when a service monetizes it becomes enshitified.
We'll find out eventually what happens.
Well that's the nice thing about a decentralized platform. If someone tries to "take over" Lemmy, they would have to take over all 1,100 Instances on separate servers in different countries to ruin it.
I am more of a business person than a developer, so I approach it from that perspective.
I suspect that we will see different instances using different ways of paying for the service. It wouldn't surprise me in the least bit if there might be an ad supported instance, donation supported instance, subscription instance, etc. I think this is great because it puts power in the hands of the user to choose the experience they want. It should strongly encourage the design of a platform that prioritizes the user.
Right now things feel hacked together, but its inevitable that at some point performance issues, onboarding friction, and UX issues will be addressed. I really think its only a matter of time before decentralized platforms talking to each other take over.
I am fully open to people running everything collecting donations. Or even sponsorships are cool. Straight up monetization through making users pay for shit that doesn't give anything in return is not cool. Let alone the fact that users make all the content to begin with
I mean, it is possible that instance admins will be able to show advertising on ones instance, but you will be able to find dotation based, ad-free instance instead. Lemmy as a whole won't be monetized, only a particular instance. But it's only my guess
Think of the Fediverse much more like Wikipedia than anything else. It is run in donations and volunteers. It is not for profit and for the benefit of all people.
Fediverse is, well, federated. This means that it's spread across multiple servers that are independently run by their admins, but have agreed to work together and share communities between each other.
For example, lemmy.world is a site operating several communities, as are beehaw.org and lemmy.ml. One of them could choose to monetize, and that wouldn't affect the other sites. If new site pops up that is full of ads and spam, then other sites could decide to block communities from them on their site.
This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there's enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don't see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It'll start slow but if the trend continues, it's inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they'll use affiliate links for merch and promos?
If we're talking the fediverse in general, I believe Zuckerberg is launching his twitter clone very soon and it has ActivityPub integration.
That's up to the instance owners, really. I don't think the Lemmy software currently has ad support or anything like that but we could see that in the future.
Currently, most instances operate on the generosity of others. For instance, the one I'm on is mostly paid for by its owner/operator with some help with donations.
At some level they start taking so much resources that they'll need a way to be sustainable anyway. Personally, I'm hoping we see a horizontal spread out, where small groups and individuals start running their own instances. Seems more sustainable than only having like 3 large ones everybody uses.
That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.
The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don't like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there's lot of drama involved.
I think there should be some monetization. Otherwise how will people pay for the server costs. Maybe small ads placed in the platform across the fediverse?
Hmm. In the old days, pretty much every ISP ran a Usenet server. The cost was covered as part of your internet connection bill, it was just part of the service.
I could see a potential future where running a Lemmy instance became table-stakes for ISPs, like Usenet used to be.
This would run counter to the principle that lemmy should remain detached from corporate control, though. Especially considering most places (in the US anyway) live under ISP monopoly. Comcast/NBC would end up owning like 40% of lemmy.
I predict corporate interests trying to run their own lemmy, branding it as something else, extending it to include features they don't push back to the upstream projects, then federating with other instances to maximize the amount of user data that can be collected.
IMO whatever comes next needs to be decentralized from the get go, like a torrent system where the network sort of automatically scales with the user count. The fediverse is pretty cool right now but it's bound to get shitty real soon as people get tired of fronting the costs purely out of goodwill. Either the cost need to be spread around such that the individuals paying it really don't mind, or there needs to be an incentive to pay / way to monetize that is aligned with the common goal of a decentralized social network. Otherwise we'll end up with either a network of insignificant size (arguably what this is now) or a monetized shit hole like what Reddit has become
I keep thinking about how a system like that could work but I'm sure someone smarter than me has already figured out that it can't
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