With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.
Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.
How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people "group package". Lemmy access is $8/year.
Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:
- the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
- Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can't hide under the veil of anonymity.
- You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won't disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.
Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:
- I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial...
- The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won't see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.
Last but not least: I'm offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.
Thank you for your attention, and don't hesitate to ask anything.
Your original question was about moderation, this is what I'm addressing.
My argument for the "value-add" is already on the post here. Basically, I don't believe that "free" and "donation-funded" instances are sustainable or healthy for the fediverse.
You seem to have a new account on lemmy.world, which might indicate you are missing some context. Lemmy.world is "a free service" which was having a bunch of outages and was struggling to keep their service running because of the load. They, llke many other instances, try to provide "free" access but end up having to ask for donations from some generous patrons. So what you end up having is a system where a few people end up paying tens of dollars per month to support a service that is used (and abused) by tens of thousands of freeloaders.
There is also plenty of cases of Mastodon or Lemmy instances that were funded by "donations" but that the admin ended up closing the service and leaving the users stranded. Communick is an attempt to show having a commercial service can lead to better quality of service and less worries for its members.