friendica.eskimo.com
I'm really sorry to ask but at this moment my gf and me are personally still 274 euros short for rent this month 😟 :sad_cat: It been a rough month..Mastodon 🐘
Seriously. If this is your main instance, set up monthly donations. Even if it's just 1$/£/€ or whatever. Times 16k that's $16,000+/month. I donate to mine every month.
The fediverse is free because someone else is paying for it out of their own pocket. Not because they're collecting and selling your private data. So do your part. It's for the greater good and the freedom of the internet.
I mean, unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating. Nobody should be expecting to setup an instance an expect tens of thousands of dollars a month.
As an indie dev back in the day, it's a fraction of uses are willing to fork anything at all.
If anything, if you're a whale, go big on your individual donation if you want a large impact.
Either way, you shouldn't need that much money to cover server costs for a mere 16,000 users.
unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating
It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.
$10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to "free stuff" offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying "Everyone using the service needs to pay for it" is seen as an heretic.
Well.
Users don't really know what admins are up to.
I'm 100% positive there's state honeypot instances, and Lemmy being what it is you don't even really need users on it to keep track of people.
Doesn't the Netherlands help you pay for your home if you're too poor to be able to yourself?
I'm not saying don't give anything, just wondering.
Things doesn't usually work like that.
Rent subsidiaries work by your annual income and usually the cost of your rent.
For instance they may pay you 300€ a month for your rent as long as your income is less than 30.000€ a year and your rent is bellow 800€/month. And increasing the thresholds if you have kids or if you are part of a protected collective.
They may be above these thresholds. It's pretty common in Europe for people who struggle to meet ends are above the needed thresholds for getting help. As prices have gone really up and the bar for being lower class have change a lot lately as there is a lot of new extremely poor people to help. So money don't end up being enough for all. And people with normal jobs and who live alone or with their SO usually do not get any help even if they need it.
The welfare state is kind of falling apart in the latest years.
I understand it pretty well. What I don't understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on "volunteers".
In a sibling comment, you say "if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it". Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?
We are not talking about any small-time instance. It's the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn't that a sign that this is not sustainable?
What I don't understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on "volunteers".
On reddit, the picture was pretty clear: admins are being paid, so your average commenter is volunteering the content, not to talk about the free (or power trip sponsored) work the mods are doing. And of course with the way reddit treated it's contributors, there was huge animosity towards certain admins.
I don't see the participants here riding any more 'free' in terms of making this place work. The difference is that the admin is contributing money, instead of getting paid.
I can get behind a campaign for temporarily funding hosting costs, but that probably would not include rent or pay for the admin. It feels the main problem is rooted in our economy somewhere, but this is also something of a 'put your own oxygen mask on first' scenarios.
It is frustrating that someone who does such an amazing thing for the common good is struggling to get a fraction of a Zach Braff indiegogo project. You are also doing a good thing by spreading the message, but the pressure on this donation almost alienates me. Without knowing much about server instances, I imagine there are less fortunate alternatives, like moving the hosts to someone close by, outsourcing certain roles to trusted folk while the admin finds the time and money to fund their hobby again.
I hope I'm not coming over as too cold, it just feels like you are trying to solve a way bigger problem than we have. We need the instances run by volunteers. Would the admin be happier if their project died, or temporarily be handed over (if this is possible at all)? What's better for the thousands of users? Is it fair to the admin? Shit no. Can they get the funding to pay for their hobby? Maybe. Is it fair if they are using the instance as leverage?
I think that the crux of the matter is about whether or not we see this as "just a hobby" or if we really see an investment in the Fediverse as the best alternative that we have for an open (I am not going to say "free" to avoid confusion) web that can take power away from Big Tech and back to the people.
We need the instances run by volunteers.
Why? Are you going to tell me that the 98% of non-paying users are struggling so much with their finances that they can not afford to pay a couple of bucks per month to an admin?
If the numbers were reversed and we had 2% of the people saying "sorry, I really can not afford this. Can I have access still?" I would be a lot more understanding. Hell, the number could go up to even 20% and I wouldn't mind opening a few free accounts...
But 98%? I can bet that the most if not all find a way to pay for Netflix, or Spotify, or their games but $2.50 a month is suddenly too much for ninety-and-eight percent of the people?
"just a hobby"
Love the enthusiasm! If anything gives me faith in the world, it's that we have the Gnu crowd. I think it's hard not to fall in love with it in the gloom of the late-freemium era.
Stop rummaging in other people's wallet. Money as it is, is a very sensitive topic. Also further down in this thread you bring in addiction, alienating further people.
Reddit is having trouble monetizing, yet you blame druggies from this very community for similar problems we're facing. What is your point? Where are you going? What do you want?
We have no tools against capitalism besides pushing a friggin 'buy me a coffee' button anywhere possible. Maybe Copyleft for those who'd proudly piss in the headwind. If you wanna make the system better, that's great! It just feels like you are lashing out at the community instead of empathizing. Broadcasting ideals is alright if you only want to vent about it and not actually look for solutions.
Can you imagine me not contributing monetarily but wanting the best for all of us? You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here, but the things you are campaigning for go straight against the spirit of the movement. Work with what we have to make shit better for all (while somehow hardening against capitalism).
My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.
Reddit is having trouble monetizing
They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.
We have no tools against capitalism.
Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.
Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.
Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.
You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.
If I am, then the discussion should be "how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?" instead of this "you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing."
Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:
May I interest you in one shiny topic-based Lemmy instance? How about fifteen?Raphael Lullis
If providing a completely voluntary service is too much of a personal burden, the solution is to stop doing it. No one is being exploited, all relationships on Lemmy and Mastadon are completely voluntary by design.
Personally I don't mind the idea of Lemmy embracing a syndicalist financial model or something of that nature but you're simply spouting a bunch of entitled nonsense.
So? Do, or don't. Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running, or it doesn't and goes under.
Altruism doesn't pay the bills; but it doesn't hurt to ask. Can't blame them for that.
Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running
You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.
I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.
They can invite to join the party, but you are still going to need those nasty capitalists to fill your cupRaphael Lullis
Are yall not sponsoring this project on patreon or otherwise?
I pitch in something like 1-2 bucks to desalines and a few bucks to .world every month.
Context for people reading this: feddit.org/post/2600584
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
Recent discussion I had with rglullis: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812…
For lemmy.world / mastodon.world including some of the smaller instances we host, it's like 0,06 euro per active user per month.
If every active user would pay 2 Euro per year that would be enough to cover hosting costs.
If every active user would pay 1 euro per month, I could quit my dayjob and focus on the Fediverse fulltime.
(Sidenote: Stux and I created the non-profit Fedihosting Foundation which owns lemmy.world .. but finances are still separate for his and my instances)
Thank you for providing data for LW, and thank you for your sysadmin work!
While we are talking, there have been occurrences of "power tripping" by some LW mods (e.g. lemmy.world/post/23229045/1441…) , is there any mechanism to escalate this to you?
Sending e-mail to info at lemmy dot world would be the best option. The team will pick that up.
(By the way: 2 EUR per year would be enough if every active user would donate that but they don't)
Thanks, I might send an email later.
By the way: 2 EUR per year would be enough if every active user would donate that but they don’t
Indeed. Have you thought about promoting this in an announcement post?
I answered here 5 days ago: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812…
Which, for some reason, didn't make it to your instance? communick.news/comment/4930027
Both versions of the post also show 106 vs 105 comments, so there seems to be something here
I meant it as "So what if they ask for help? Do, or don't (donate)"
The initial post came off to me as a dig at the admin for openly asking for money.
I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.
I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people's servers.
Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?
You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn't en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I'm just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage. I already pay for that regardless as I use it for other things. Though ideally I would not want to allocate more than 500Gb for a one person instance, idk how reasonable would that be.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you'll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
And now that I'm wondering things I wonder how feasible would it be to host very small instances on cheap devices like sbc or cheap mini-pc. Maybe aiming for thousands of instances with a few dozen people in each instead of a few dozen of instances with thousand of people in them.
The core argument here is should there be an expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs.
Personally, if an instance is run off of donations, then it's a nice to have. As an admin, you shouldn't have that expectation. If you no longer want to volunteer your time, then don't. Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
I'm also okay with paid instances and admins trying to make a reasonable salary or even making additional profit as long as it's transparent to the users. It's their choice to charge, it's our choice to pay.
Overall, instances should be run by a group of volunteers, not a single individual. Otherwise, the long term viability of the instance is questionable.
this is how it was in the BBS days. We volunteered our time to run the boards because we enjoyed it and had the hardware. I covered the telco costs and electricity because i could, and enjoyed providing the space for my friends. When it stopped being feasible you passed the torch. There's always someone else with the interest and the desire and the means to be in charge for a while!
There were pay bbs' and i just didn't use em cuz i was already at my limit paying for two phone lines and hardware.
I don't mind pitching in now and then but I don't feel like i owe any of the admins anything beyond gratitude.
I assume he's applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.