And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
How?
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time. I am more preoccupied by death of instances on oixelfed though
Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.
Small instances a lot more
Because there are more of them?
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
they will have to enshittify to stay afloat, like allowing ads into instances, thats the reality if they want to grow.
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\