Is that you Huffman?
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
76 points (94.2% liked)
No Stupid Questions
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No such thing. Ask away!
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Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.
Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you're relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you're getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)
Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.
It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin and Kbin.social (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.
Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)
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Alright, fair enough
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I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don't ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.
This. We need to stop seeing such online gatherings as opportunities to be profitable. I personally view them as social interactions and opportunities to exchange random and interesting information. Water cooler talks or forums (the ancient greek/roman sort - I wonder how many shitposts those had).
When you invite people over to your house for a gathering (also incurring costs - even if people bring something to cover the catering bit, you still have to clean up afterwards) you wouldn't consider it as an opportunity to profit right? (Or you are and are just hosting an MLM party or have some sort of agenda to push).
Lemmy isn't profitable, and doesn't plan to be. It's not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it's designed to be an decentralized community running on P2P open source software. If you work in the web development or IT industry full time, you likely have the skills to set up an Instance of your own for little or no cost, even of its just a side hobby on your personal computer.
Yes, in a way this means we are the equivalent one of those massive 'miniature' train sets that adult hobbiests play with in their garage.
Another important factor to note is it takes a fraction of hosting power to host lemmy vs something like reddit, because reddit does an insane amount of power hungry tracking in the background. Lemmy (and apps like jebora) don't collect anything, so don't need to constantly stream all that data to the main server instance
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Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
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I believe Lemmy makes money like Wikipedia does for now
The internet and even the web didn't need profit for many long years before the web went commercial. I've been publishing my own website since 1996 without advertising or asking for donations. I just publish it because I love the topic. Profit is NOT the be-all and end-all of existence.
Don't believe me? How much would you sell your children for?
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As other people's said, profit is/should not be the driving force. However you should chip in every now and then towards the instance of your choosing. I have donated to lemmy.world and will do it again.
I see it as normal for the instance owners to have their costs completely covered and some extra on top for them for all the time spent.
I know you probably have seen a lot of answers from others already and my answer would probably be the same as others (for obvious reasons) but I am going to answer anyway because you told me not to lurk. Please note that I am not an expert (or even somebody who knows much about business) so don't expect my answers to even be half correct.
If by profitable you mean "not making a loss" then probably yes as long as if there are enough donations to cover the expense of running the server.
But if by profitable you mean "making enough money to be sustainable long term" then my answer would be most likely not because it's not designed to make money (unlike ahem...certain platform)
I would like to see the host push ads, so that it's sustainable. It doesn't have anything negative to the community except it will sustain the instance do does the Fediverse.
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Phase 1: Collect underpants
At this point, even Reddit is not profitable.
In addition to all of the answers here, development costs for protocols like ActivityPub can be partially offset by grants by organizations like W3C that work to build open standards.
The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.
Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.
I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.