this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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PSA: Communick is a privacy-focused provider of fediverse instances, pledging to donate 20% of its profits to FOSS projects (communick.news)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I will have their name on file means that they can't hide under the veil of anonymity

I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked

πŸ€”

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I see your point. What I mean is that I will only know that an user has done something stupid if they get reported, and those that are subscribing to a paid plan will be less inclined to do stupid/illegal stuff because they will have gone through some form of KYC.

I am not tracking your outbound clicks, I am not running any A/B tests, I am not even requiring a valid email address for people to signup. I want to make this as simple and frictionless as possible, except for the friction of payment, which is how I hope I will be able to make the whole system manageable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What if a user has opinions you don't like?

Also I'm not sure I understand the value added service of having you between me and a free Lemmy instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I am not sure I understand the question. Moderation is not about policing everyone's opinion, but just to ensure that the environment is not toxic. People can disagree on many things and still participate in a civil society.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The problem is that it seems like you're the arbiter of what is toxic and what isn't, and it doesn't sound like thats something you even consider questionable.

And again, what's the value add?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How is that different from the moderation done by your instance?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My instance is not a paid service and I still haven't understood what your value add is, especially now that you're saying you're the same only with a price tag.

I'm honestly trying to understand what the value you're pricing into your model. Your replies are not heartening in that respect.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is a really interesting idea, I'm definitely considering it. I'm already giving on lemmy.world patreon more than your plans cost. I have two questions. First, just from a business perspective, how do you think about differentiating yourself from the donation based servers? Is there something of extra value that people get from your instance and service that they can't get elsewhere?

I'm also interested in your moderation and federation policies. I think a potential barrier here is paying upfront for a year only to disagree with a federation decision down the line. Maybe you could have different instances with different policies? Like one that is federated with threads, one that isn't, one that's federated with hexbear one that isn't. Maybe that's overly complicated once you start adding up all the different combinations that people come up with (personally I'm fine with threads, meh on hexbear, and a no on explodingheads).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thank you! I've started Communick about 4 years ago as a side-project and today it's the first day that I'm feeling that there are some people that "get it". Now I'm trying to make it my full-time job and the reaction here gives me some hope.

For your questions:

  • yes, I will be working on integrations that are going to be specific to the flagship and managed instances. Just yesterday I launched a tool that imports your twitter follows to mastodon, which I hope can help people migrating away from there. If you have any other ideas for features you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them.

  • Moderation is always going to be a difficult problem. No matter how we slice it, any decision will make some part of the group unhappy. So far I've been focused more on making sure that the our instances are not the ones causing problems in the fediverse and recommending to block/mute individuals from outside for whatever reason they deem fit. I've also found (so far) that it has been more effective to ask people in our instance to not follow trolls/extremists from outside than to try to argue for an instance-wide ban. But, like I said in the original post, having a paid-instance has done wonders to ensure that all members are there to make the best use of their time and has made things very civil.

With the Mastodon/Lemmy instances growing, I will certainly have to revisit this approach. I am not planning on keeping multiple instances to cater to the different "factions", but I do believe that one way to solve this will be by letting those that disagree with the "main instance" to create a "fork" into a managed instance. For example, it 50 people are on the flagship instance and they decide that they are not happy with the moderation, they can create their own instance (which I would still be hosting) and apply the rules that they seem fit. Price-wise things wouldn't change and they would be probably happier on a "forked" instance than on the main one.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This looks excellent! I'm very interested in the matrix plans, as well as the group plans. I like the combined mastodon & matrix plan.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Come on over! There is a 14-day trial and no payment is required to get started...

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

What a great idea! I hope this goes well, it seems like a great solution to the profitability problem of the Fediverse. I wish more sites and services used this model.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I wanted to give a shoutout to @[email protected] for encouraging me to share but for some reason lemmy.world is not giving me the proper links to the discussions... https://imgur.com/XnqvgH1.png

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm not sure I'm on board. I see why you want it though.

4/year for all services and a wiki style donation set up?

OR a yearly price that goes down with usage? If you use the fediverse enough the price goes down to an irrelevant price like $2/y (for all fedi access). So it starts at say 8/year for all services then goes down based off your activity or like every year you have a login. If you don't login it cancels the subscription automatically and if you reactivate your account you're back at 8/year.

Year one - 8$

Year two - 6$

Year three - 4$

Year four and on - 2$

And everytime paytime comes around there's an option to donate more if you want to. Maybe with some other benefit? Link up with an app developer and if you donate 10$+ thank you get to pick from a paid app to get for "free"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I like this idea, buying 3 years or something for less sounds nice

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

For the first: I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I don't like the donation-based model for social media instances. I don't think it is fair and I think it's self-limiting.

For the second: having the price going down with usage might be an interest way to increase "customer loyalty", but it feels a bit like one of those "growth hacks". If I saw someone offering that, I am not sure I'd like it. Also, $2/year might not even be enough to cover operational costs, if you factor in things like media storage and backups.

Maybe I'd have to find a different price policy for people living in middle/low-income countries and I could entertain the idea of "corporate sponsorships" (e.g, every month there would be one pinned post for someone paying for the visibility) to subsidize users but I guess that the average internet user from any OECD country can well afford $8/year. Don't you?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Interesting perspective

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

So... I read your post and the website but I still have no idea how any of this works. Please express yourself more clearly; I would suggest starting with β€œCommunick lets you..."

What I understand from this:

  • I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.
  • You will create and host an instance for me.
  • To create and use an account on β€œmy” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.
  • There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.
  • If I decide to leave and stop paying, I can seamlessly transfer administration of the instance to another paying user. If I leave without a β€œtestament”, it will be left unadministered but its content and basic functionally will remain online for some time.
  • You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

Is this correct?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.

Correct.

You will create and host an instance for me. To create and use an account on β€œmy” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.

Incorrect. The $8/year Lemmy plan gives you access to an account in the "flagship instance". To get an an instance just for yourself, you would be looking into the "managed hosting" plans. Managed hosting is something completely differerent, you are in full control of the instance, the rules, who to invite, etc. This means that this offering of course has different price points.

There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.

Correct

You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

Basically correct, but the important thing is that the idea that I will be donating to the projects related to services I am providing.

To give a more concrete example: if 30% of the revenue comes from people paying for Lemmy, 40% from Mastodon, 20% from Pixelfed and 10% from Matrix, and if I get $100k in an year profit ( a man can dream), then I will be giving $6k to Lemmy, $8k to Mastodon, $4k to Pixelfed and $2k to the Matrix foundation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks.

What is the difference between your β€œflagship instance” and a normal one? You seem to mention

  • professional hosting, which I assume means a fast server and very low downtime, as well as good security and maintenance (such as updates)
  • longevity of the instance
  • lack of spam from local accounts (though I assume you federate similarly to other instances where spam can be posted so that should not matter as much)
[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

The "flagship" instances are the ones where Communick manages and the customers pay only for accounts:

The "regular" ones are the those that the customer is getting a whole instance for themselves, and my "job" is to manage, keep it updated, run backups, etc. They need to have their own domain and they are fully responsible for moderation, who gets access to their instance, etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

In which country is your company based?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's an American LLC

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Is that free forever deal still on? I created a account on the main site and then the lemmy site but didn't get an email. I can't login. That was 30 minutes ago. My username is aamira. I don't want to come off impatient, I just want to make sure this worked before I go to bed. Thanks!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sorry I didn't respond before, I also ended going to bed. And yeah, you are all set!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Awesome, yeah definitely works :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Great! Please drop by [email protected] and say hi in the intro topic. I also would like to know if there is any interest in having new communities and topics.