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I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.
Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.
Honestly I would hate that, but if that's what keeps the lights on then I'll deal with it. I would prefer to move to an anonymous donation model like Wikipedia but I'm skeptical that will work.
Sounds good as long as it doesn't provide an incentive to pay for posts or comments to rise to visibility because then there'll just be advertising everywhere
donations to my favorite instances, like wikipedia i hope :)
I'm running a barebones server for myself and a few communities (not many subs yet) which will run for less than a Starbucks coffee a month... (Assuming I don't need more storage space... Lemmy seems pretty light. The main servers are gonna carry the load unfortunately... Beehaw.org had a transparency post about financials as of about a week ago they said something that their instance was costing like 50-75ish a month of I recall.
I would like to join a cooperatively owned instance.
I have been tempted to join cosocial.ca, however I don't care for microblogging (Mastodon) as much as something forum-like such as a Lemmy instance.
There already is a question similar to this. You can find lots of ideas there :)
Unfortunately theyβre all copyrighted so wonβt work for income.
By not asking the same question every single day.
Personally I plan on donating the price of Reddit Premium to my instance owner
Whenever he figures out donations that is :))
I don't know what kinda person happens to have a massive server cluster sitting around waiting to go, but @TheDude is the dude, and the dude abides.
The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.
So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.
Bank accounts and escrow and payment processors are complicated and require real companies with tax identifiers. Nobody is gonna set that up just to host an instance. IMO this is a perfect use case for crypto. Could be a monthly thing or micropayments. Maybe something a bit like the Basic Attention Token.
It's a perfect use case for Patreon, PayPal, and similar services that are easier to set up than any of the things you mentioned. And the stability of fiat currency is a benefit when we're looking at covering operating costs.
Crypto is fine as an option, but it doesn't seem like a great fit for the primary.
Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.
There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.___
I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don't really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn't just a social media, it's a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.
Yup. On Facebook/Twitter the product isn't the content, its a whole shitload of agregated personal data of the users and advertisements that use said data to target the users, so its only natural that these companies would be spending ludicrous amounts of money finding new ways to collect and parse that data.