this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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It's nice, but keep in mind that it's largely unsustainable without some form of revenue. Reddit didn't turn evil just because of a bunch of shareholders, it went that way because the money was drying up and they weren't making any money. They're still not making money.
As lemmy grows and server costs increase, especially for the larger instances, more will be asked of the community to help foot the bill. This current server has a good breakdown in costs for those curious and while it doesn't seem like a lot today, it'll start to jump quite considerably as you hit certain thresholds on database sizes and whatnot. If you like this server, please by the admin a coffee to say thank you :)
(I'm not affiliated in any way with aussie.zone, it's not even my home instance).
On the point of being unsustainable I disagree. Instances will need to find an equilibrium between cost/expense and retention of old content. The higher the revenue/cost tolerance, the older the content that can be retained. I expect most instances will end up purging non-local content after an amount of time, but retain local content as long as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but I have confidence that people smarter than me will come up with systems to do this. It may result in a usenet style setup where instances boast about their retention periods.
On your second point re: community contributions, I agree entirely. I've been very fortunate that there have been some generous donations from aussie.zone users, so I'm not worried about server costs at this point. Server costs will go up as data volumes increase, that is unavoidable. How the community decides to handle this in the future is the real question, based on what I've experienced so far I'm confident we'll be around for a long time to come.
A temperature system would be good for aged content. Content that isn’t considered hot is dropped from federated instances and only lives on the parent.
If some old thread goes viral years later it is hot again and refederated until it cools. Old content would be replaced with a link back to original instance.
Edit: Drop temp to be server side config as some instances may want to be archives
If it ever comes down to that. I'm not adverse to obvious and non-intrusive ads. It's the fake shit that pretends to be organic that pisses me off. I feel it pollutes the entire social media experience with distrust.
I have no intention of every placing ads on aussie.zone. Should finances ever become an issue, I'll send up a 🚩 with a stickied post.
For now, finances are fine 🙂
Music to my ears Lodion :)
As someone who works with the advertisers, any concessions to them simply starts the process that snowballs into a nightmare scenario. There's just too much money to be made. Small non-intrusive ads become short skippable ads becomes larger temporarily unskippable ads, becomes multiple short skippable ads becomes dominant intrusive ads and when the well runs dry there it becomes sponsored content and Guerilla advertising. Fuck em all. Cut them off at the neck and never let them in.
it's there somewhere I can read about how that local vs non content is handled? for example, if you delete non local from AZ. what does that mean from an end users perspective? how does the experience change or can they simply never see beyond X years old content? considering firing up an instance myself, even if it's just for friends.
I was speaking in general terms, there is currently no "delete oldest content" functionality in lemmy, so far as I know. But yes I imagine it would simply mean that for any older non-local content, users would need to initiate a pull from its home instance somehow.
Capitalism isn't Sustainable(or efficient). There is a lot of overhead to make sure the wage slaves stay in line(Managment, and middle managment), and to make sure the wage slaves don't sue the company(HR), and to clean up the buildings the wage slaves work at(Janitors), and the cost of the building, all that plus, taxes, paying the greedy shareholders(The largest cost), Marketing(Ads).
Its A LOT simpler when its just a server and someone who enjoys working on it. People who keep repeating that this isn't sustainable don't know how shitty capitalism is. Its not the servers that are unsustainable its the parasites on top.
I think it's fair to say that people who say things like this don't understand that it costs money to host these servers. All the enjoyment from working on it in the world doesn't pay for database or image storage or CPU cycles or bandwidth.
You're kind of jumping over the comment there. You pay for database or image storage or CPU cycles or bandwidth PLUS the management, execs, HR, shareholders if this were to be run like a company. What they're saying is we kind of skip the most expensive costs by relying on the fediverse as a non-profit entity.8
I'll be honest, the reason I skipped over this is because it's entirely unsubstantiated. Show me an up to date breakdown of reddit's costs that shows how much is exec pay versus infrastructure costs or whatever.
We're talking an entirely different scale here as well. Anyone can host Lemmy on an old computer and that'll work to a point, but as more users join you'll need a bigger, faster computer. Eventually you can't make a computer any bigger and you need to start offloading key components on to separate computers - one for your database, one for your image cache, etc.
Before you know it, you suddenly can't make the database computer any bigger, you need to split that off into more and more complex architecture. You need more caching, a CDN to make sure requests don't hose your CPU and the site remains fast. All big Lemmy instances will hit this issue with scale sooner or later. When that happens, it starts to become a full-time job just looking after that infrastructure, which is now going to cost you thousands of $ a month. Then you need to factor in that the lemmy software isn't currently built for that kind of scale (It does scale to a point, don't get me wrong), it's built to scale out in instances, not to scale single instances. It wouldn't take a huge amount to add in the code necessary to help an individual instance scale out, but someone has to write and maintain that code, which in itself starts to become a full time job or several full time jobs.
The future of lemmy is bright, but it will hinge on users supporting their communities and if they don't, expect things like ads to appear.
Look at lichess.org vs chess.com.
Lichess non-profit, and is maintained by a couple of devs funded purely by donations.
Chess.com has hundred of employees and requires tens of millions of annual revenue to break even. It has investors that expect yearly growth.
The user experience is not much different.
Wikipedia is another great example of a massive website that is run as a non-profit, is ad free and has stayed true to its original purpose.
Chess.com has something like 10million active users per day, I don't think they're directly comparable. Plus the problem space is much, much simpler with an online cheese game than federating thousands of servers with millions of users.
To be clear, I never said that this was impossible, just that we need to keep expectations in check and that nothing is free.
And Wikipedia?
We should strive to create a platform that isn't captured by the interests of advertisers. You're stating the obvious that nothing is free.
Alternatively, you can simply stop accepting new members (or shut down completely) if the donations dry up and you can’t afford to run your instance - or if you just don’t want to do it anymore. Other instances will take up the slack. Lemmy will live on. That’s how the fediverse works.
This is definitely what I am interested in and have concerns about - look at the growth of .world already. Assuming growth continues, there comes a point where there has to be some major upgrading and additional costs to deal with all aspects of that growth and the complexity and services and requests and compliance that comes with it.
How will data be retained, or won't it? What if an instance becomes unsustainable or the owner decides they no longer want to deal with it all - there's a lot of questions and at the moment it doesn't feel clear.
I do homelab and am very aware of the costs. I wasn't saying it's free. I'm saying that donations and maybe a gilding system could easily keep these servers afloat. No need for ads.
Okay, what do you propose then to solve the money issues?
Eat the rich
sounds good to me!
how tho?
Mate! Where do you think you are?
Fire up the barbie is how we'll eat 'em.
Tax them like the US did in the 50's, at a global level. Set maximum values for wages and assets. Tax inheritances to level the playing field.
Donations and maybe a guiding system.
Donations for all of society? :s
It's much more cost-effective, for everyone involved, in a decentralized platform. All those big company server costs are broken up into dozens eventually hundreds and thousands of different servers just like World Wide Web itself, with websites for each community, right? Communities chip in to buy Little League shirts for their town baseball teams, we set up websites for our book sales and bake sales, school PTAs are able to accomplish great things because their parent communities can afford to help in smaller circles.
Decentralization doesn't just decentralize the data. It also decentralizes the semantics, the funding, etc.
This is very true, but there's still going to be some large instances and some small instances and the large ones will have to deal with it at some point. It's not the end of the world or anything, there's a myriad of ways of dealing with it but I would expect some of the larger instances to end up with some pretty hefty bills that'll need paying. Hopefully the communities on those instances will help, but if not then we might start seeing ads appearing or sponsored content or whatever.
I would hope, like you say, those larger instances would naturally realize larger donations with the higher user volume.
But sure, each instance can make the choice to inject ads in their users’ feeds. Larger instances may have promos with companies like video game publishers or movie studios. But I think the natural infrastructure that the Fediverse provides, limits this from the crazy ad levels we see in today's failing mainstream, centralized social media companies.
FWIW - the homepage here say's this Lemmy instance has 182 monthly users. That post says it's costing $49/month to run it.
That means "your share" of the costs, assuming everybody chips in, would be about $0.30 per month.
A much more realistic assumption is that maybe 10% (and probably less) of all users will pay up, so if you want to have this place thrive without the admin/owner wondering how much money they're gonna have to pony up themselves you should be thinking that your "ad free" experience here deserves a donation of at least $3 per month. I figure $5 per month isn';t gonna hurt me, and signed up to donate that. (you're welcome, any of you other 17 or so other people who can't afford to support aussie.zone...)
Reddit was enshittified because they need the ad revenue to pay out their investors. Let's not make Lodion wonder WFT he's doing running aussie.zone because he's out of pocket every month in hosting costs...
This is why I donate to all my instances. I'm happy to donate some to have an ad free experience. It's totally worth it
Yeah, but the amount of money needed to cover server costs is way lower than the amount you need to run Reddit with all its corporate overhead and need to generate returns for the investors that have sunk a billion dollars into the platform.
Lemmy just needs to cover costs.
Have people pay a small fee to engage with the community. Ad revenue is not the only way to make money, remember the good old days when people actually paid for services that provide value?
Start with relying on donations and then make make it mandatory if required.
Ad revenue is a good way to make big profits, not just revenue, not something that we are interested in.
Interesting, thanks for posting!
How does one donate to lemmy.world
Theres a patreon link for their mastodon.world server. They said its fine to donate to that one for now.
Here me out
The only way Lemmy can remain this way, and be able to afford the rising cost of server upkeep is to rely on ad revenue generated by bots, generated on dead websites. Now ofcourse the people running the servers would need to also own these ad riddled websites.
The way it would work, is droves of AI get trained to surf the internet, click on click bait, look at ads, and simply simulate human foot traffic.
This money would then go towards server upkeep in the fediverse.
It's kind of a loophole.
I hope your suggestion wasn't intended to be taken seriously :)
Ads are not for paying the bills, they are for extracting value. It's not the same thing. The bills are finite and scale with usage. Profit is unlimited.
Something has to pay the bills.
How many ways can a site be funded? Can I set up something like Tabs for a Cause and direct the money towards keeping Lemmy going?
That's kind of up to the people running the instance, I think.