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

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

Very intuitive 🙄

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

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.

literally not there on mobile

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

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 you

Yes, 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.

Or someone, perchance, using guerilla marketing by asking a support community to support a product, perchance, they want to promote.