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!
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.
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
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?
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
Germany
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.
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.
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
We could have a long conversation potential models for funding this, but I believe that until today the current audience prefers to reject economic reality and still believes that all work should be volunteer-based. Of course I disagree, but the only strong argument that I can make so far is that Communick has been running for almost 8 years and has outlived the overwhelming majority of “community-funded” instances out there.
The link you clicked on is literally labeled [ $29.00 / YEARLY ]
I think you were just skimming really quickly.
You 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 🙄
It’s clearly a bug. Consider this a signal that I still hand-roll my CSS instead of just using clankers to vibe-code around.
I see what I assume they saw.
Interesting!
A phone layout glitch.
On a bigger screen it all fits.