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!

  • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
    3·
    12 hours ago

    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.

    • aizakku@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      9 hours ago

      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

      • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
        3·
        8 hours ago

        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.

        • aizakku@sh.itjust.worksOP
          1·
          8 hours ago

          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

          • rglullis@communick.newsEnglish
            1·
            5 hours ago

            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.