I’m not sure there’s a good Community to discuss meta elements of Lemmy? So I’m posting here, this isn’t necessarily a support question (and might be apt in a Lemmy developers community or asked on matrix) but I also think it’d be valuable to get input from a larger pool of Lemmy users.
Last night I stumbled on a dead instance that have links somehow through the fediverse still being able to read the body text but with dead images link and whatnot due to being served from a now defunct instance. And that inspired me to make this post, curious what admins are supposed to do to try and make Lemmy more sustainable to host/incentivize instances to stay up (even if their admin is kind of a jerk or whatever).The admin of this instance said a couple years ago he was shutting down the domain and was really angry to be hosting a Lemmy instance with like 250k visitors or whatever his metric was. He had a donate button but was not making enough to recoup the hosting costs and basically made inflamed comments about the users giving him a pittance of $60/month.
I’ve tried to host my own Lemmy instance and did for about a year but I had specific goals in mind to make a local community to get local businesses off the other US social platforms. I didn’t find much time or effort making this a reality, just me and few friends had accounts on the instance so I pulled the plug.
But it made me curious if Lemmy devs or community have some sense of what would be a good way to help admins fund their hosting costs? I’d be against ads/trackers, promoted content as they erode privacy and the spirit of the fediverse imo. But what would the community’s thoughts on having some sort of payment system baked in where it’s kind of gimmicky but translates to $ for server costs?
I personally don’t pay for “free” things, which is coincidentally how most people operate; But smaller, humanity defining initiatives like the fediverse subverting US tech oligarchy might be a decent cause to toss a few dollars at every month via some sort of subscription with some value add. Like Reddit has awards you can give other users, maybe something like that? I’d love to hear what others think!
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humanity defining initiatives like the fediverse subverting US tech oligarchy might be a decent cause to toss a few dollars at every month.
this is how i see it and i do mine on an annual basis so that i don’t think about it like i used to do with my netflix subscription.
Just check instances to see if they have donations.
Another thing that would help is if there was a way to link to a post/comment that wasn’t an https URL. E.g., you can link to a community like
! community@instanceand when anybody clicks it, they’ll go to their instance’s view of the community, but when you link a post it’s likehttps://instance/post/whateverso it navigates you away from your home instance. This is just in relation to the “seeing dead links” aspect. Because even when an instance goes offline, other instances will still have copies of the posts from it.I believe that feature is coming in Lemmy v1.0
Aw hell yeah!
It’s a great idea, but I believe the majority of users will not opt in or donate less than the value they derive from the service.
Radiohead in the late naughts released an album as “pay what you want” on their site and only 60% paid anything with the average price being paid of only $2.26. An album has always been closer to $20 in my mind so they took a risk and got pennies on the dollar. It was still profitable and they have adoring fans that would likely support them regardless so it’s probably why it’s so “high” compared to other things like applications.
Just food for thought. Personally, if I were to donate to Lemmy id be more inclined to donate to the devs than the admins, we only have finite dollars to spend after all. But I think the admins shouldn’t be left holding the hosting costs without some means to break-even. Maybe Lemmy devs could like profit-share with larger instances? But the charity system is all predicated on people opening their wallets/hearts to the cause. Tangible benefits is an easier sell to most users, and very popular revenue stream.
Radiohead album info: https://songremains.substack.com/p/pay-what-you-want-how-radiohead-proved
You’re comparing a for-profit endeavor with something that isn’t meant to be profit driven. Apart from that, what “profit” do the Lemmy devs make? They aren’t making anywhere near market rate for the skill set they provide.
IMO more server admins should feel okay to charge people for accounts on their servers, even if just to break even.
I personally don’t pay for “free” things
That’s fine, but someone else is always paying for your part of the cost, either directly like a Lemmy server admin, or indirectly like with a freemium service where paid users subsidize the free users, or via ads.
Yea, I made that point to more or less parrot what’s known in the industry. People don’t pay for software if they can. I’m a software dev, I’ve made apps and it’s generally whales who spend the most. I work for fun and hopefully make some money, not so far yet…
My anecdote in the posting about the admin being mad is a reality. Some admin might just take it upon themselves to add ad trackers or whatever but having a system baked into Lemmy could be handy to help the admin recoup costs.
This is exactly the reason I signed up at Communick.
It’s a paid fediverse host.You might not want to pay for “free” stuff; That’s fine. But you have to remember, someone else is always paying for you then. There’s no knowing how long they’ll be willing to do that.
This looks interesting, but curious how they have E2E encrypted messaging in Lemmy? I haven’t checked for a hot minute, but I thought Lemmy DMs were not E2E encrypted?
If they are, and they are donating 20% of their profits or whatever to the underlying techs then why can’t they prioritize getting that into all Lemmy instances? Also, how would this work if you DM me and I don’t use Communick? Does that mean your DMs to me aren’t encrypted? this is a main feature they’re advertising, but they don’t say how?
This sounds hopeful at best and dubious at worst. Where’s the proof? Their website is barren of any sort of documentation.
Ninja edit:
some else is always paying for youYes, and I hope this discussion can help make this an avenue for devs to get some ideas of what would be acceptable by today’s users.
They don’t have E2E encryption in Lemmy, or any ActivityPub software; No one does. The encrypted messaging is through Matrix. That’s a kind of federated Discord alternative. It’s got nothing to do with Lemmy or ActivityPub. Matrix has it’s own protocol that is E2E encrypted. But even though it’s a separate service, it’s included in Communick’s bundle.
They do have a line that says “We only adopt messaging protocols that provide end-to-end encryption”. Lemmy and Mastodon aren’t messaging protocols; Matrix is.
They can’t donate to all the other instances, in part because there are thousands of instances. They’d be sending checks of only pennies each, to thousands of hosts. Each instance would have to charge their own users.
curious how they have E2E encrypted messaging in Lemmy?
I think the E2EE claim is just for messaging (i.e. Matrix).
Yea that would make sense, I checked and yea Lemmy doesn’t have e2e encryption and state it’s basically impossible on the fediverse. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3319
I like the concept but I’m skeptical, if they had a more granular breakdown and stated explicitly Lemmy isn’t E2E encrypted then I’d give them more credit. But it seems more like a marketing site than something useful for those who want to vet the tech they use. Their docs are basically useless https://communick.com/docs
When I was hosting Lemmy it was through Elestio (kinda like DevOps as a service) in DigitalOcean, was like 50CAD per month.
So $29/user is also steep imo. It can be done for much cheaper with a VPS but then you gotta manage the box yourself. But you could literally host all these services in your own VPS for likely less the cost of one user subscription 🤷♂️Edit it’s 29/annum not month. Better value prop than I’ve made it seem but wasn’t clear until I clicked on the link to buy
Yes, I have to agree that the documentation area of the site has been lacking. Let me know what information you think should be there and I will try to update it.
They make great claims on the main page but have no support on how they are going to maintain this
Privacy No tracking. No data collection. Our business model is simple: we host a service and some of our customers pay for it. No need to track you, sell your information, look into your messages…
Where is this hosted? By whom? Why the ellipses at the end? Are they really not looking into my messages because it’s spelled out kinda suspiciously. How can we trust them if they don’t give us means to vet them?
End-to-End Encryption Keep the conversation to yourself We only adopt messaging protocols that provide end-to-end encryption, so you can be sure your conversations are protected and no one can snoop on them.
This is something in this thread we found out couldn’t be true. A tabular matrix of E2E encrypted systems they provide would be more transparent or some asterisk that fediverse isn’t e2e encrypted.
I think it’s actually pretty good value proposition at $29/year but idk, if they were more transparent it’d be an easier sell. But to my untrained eye it seems a bit deceptive and/or lazy
Where is this hosted?
Germany
By whom?
Servers are from Hetzner. My company (MushroomLabs, LLC) is registered in the USA because I used to live there before moving to Germany. I’ve checked into creating a proper GmbH but revenue so far is so modest that it has not justified the effort.
How can we trust them if they don’t give us means to vet them?
For the services that are end-to-end encrypted, there is no need to trust me. For the social media services, by definition your data is public and sent to other servers.
A tabular matrix of E2E encrypted systems they provide would be more transparent.
This table would have only two entries: Matrix and XMPP.
Like Steve explained. The messaging protocols are e2ee, the Social Web/Fediverse services are all public by its own nature. There is no such thing as Private Social Network.
I will look into changing the wording on the front-page to make this more clear.
Thank you!
I think what you’re doing is valuable. This thread is trying to find out if there’s a better way than just soliciting donations, which per some of my comments I note that people are very hesitant to pay for something they can go elsewhere is “free”.
The value proposition is there for Communick, and I wish you luck. But having universal revenue stream through Lemmy itself, like instance based awards (or some sort of additional flair or features for a subscribed user) could be a carrot-on-the-stick to generate a more sticky revenue stream imo
wasn’t clear until I clicked on the link to buy
The link you clicked on is literally labeled [ $29.00 / YEARLY ]
I think you were just skimming really quickly.
literally not there on mobileYou are holding it wrong… (and clearly I haven’t tested this enough on mobile) :p
Put it tn portrait mode, the overflow issue will go away…
Very intuitive 🙄
I see what I assume they saw.
Interesting!
A phone layout glitch.
On a bigger screen it all fits.
