I’m not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost… So is this place entirely donation based, or what?
It doesn’t.
If you are on my instance, for example, its hosted out of my own pocket.
I have a TON of spare compute resources laying around, and I am more than happy to donate them to this cause.
Edit- lets also be perfectly honest- hosting lemmy costs FAR less then it costs me to host plex for friends/family.
It costs me exactly $4 a month to operate my server. If it grows to the point where I have to ask for donations, I will, but for now I operate it at my own expense because I can afford it.
I am already running a server for media streaming, nextcloud and minecraft. For sure i have room to add a small lemmy instance soon, not everything needs to make money or even be electricity even. But for larger instances though they must be gething some donations.
Everything needs to generate some sort of value - I imagine a lemmy instance would generate value for you in the form of learning, or maybe the sense of accomplishment from maintaining a community. That differs from how centralised social media generates value in the form of data or money which is usually at odds with the userbase.
TBH I want a option to enable ads to support my instance since I can’t donate money. There should be a way to opt in ads . There will be a lot of people who will be willing to enable it to support their instance.
You getting ads will give them like a dollar a year and you’d absolutely have to have tracking enabled for them to even get that, unpersonalized ads are deemed pretty worthless because you don’t click on things that you aren’t into. The extra power consumption from loading ads + extra spying on you will cost you about as much as the instance would get from it.
If you donate 5 dollars a year, you’re doing more than you would by seeing ads.
That’s the neat part. You don’t.
Lemmy isn’t a company, it’s just the software. The devs develop it as a hobby, basically.
Your server is lemmy.world. It’s unclear how it will be funded as it gets big. If it goes under someone will start another one, though.
Actually- they are full time working on this.
The devs… have socialist tendencies(by their own admission, their words, not mine!), and are more then happy to live on peanuts and bread while building software for the better of humanity.
However, donations to the project, do pay for their basic expenses.
Wow, that’s impressive! Not many open-source developers don’t need a full-time gig.
IIRC they’re openly Marxists-Leninists.
since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom
It’s their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more
power overusers, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.
The world’s most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it’s certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.
Worth mentioning:
- Lemmy itself is an open source software. It’s developed by a community, and was originally created by two developers. It does not make money, except from things like donations or patreon.
- Lemmy instances are run by different members of the community. Various folks have answered ways that instances could make money but may not make money in any ways.
The Lemmy project also receives grants from NLnet (funded by the European Commission), whenever they finish milestone features. According to the developers, this was their main source of funding until very recently and are now asking for more donations.
Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it’s basically donations… either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.
But to put into context how much money we’re talking about…
- A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you’re talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
- The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That’s not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn’t take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.
Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course… those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.
A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.
The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I’d imagine largely pro bono.
I think lemmy.ml was getting money from NLnet by completing Milestones, but now that they’re scrambling to handle bugs and doing Q&A constantly I think they’re losing out on that funding. At least that’s what Dessalines reported, I believe
That’s the problem: it does not make money.
The fediverse mean that the different instances can federate, but every instance after all still has its server and its expenses just like every web service since… always. Forums, chats, socials…
So far donations or pro bono from whoever is managing an instance, but unluckily this is not sustainable if user number skyrocket.
A way would be to somehow make everything p2p but I don’t even know if it’s possible for what is needed.I wouldn’t say that’s a problem, far from it.
Servers are expensive, either someone pays, or the instance closes.
As of now very few people are on the fediverse, so it’s cheap.
But if we expect hundreds of millions of people to use it… expenses will skyrocket.
