Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)

Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?

Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.

  • Kir
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    1 year ago

    Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.

    • QuinceDaPence@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you’re relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you’re getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)

      • Kir
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        1 year ago

        OP said profitable, not sustainable.

      • sab@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.

        It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin and Kbin.social (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.

        Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)

          • sab@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Excellent question. I wish I had an equally excellent answer.

            I reluctantly use Spotify. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about them, but at least they have an API allowing for some great open source clients (such as the GTK client Spot). Eventually I’ll probably resign to listening to online radios (FIP is a clear favourite!) and my Vinyl collection (which is currently in another country).

            I had Netflix on and off for a while, but stopped for a number of reasons. I have access to the Netflix of friends, but like everything else it seems to be getting worse every day. Thankfully there are some cinemas in town showing classic movies on a regular basis.

            I guess I also pay subscriptions to Overleaf and Dropbox, both of which are necessary for work.

            As for companies like Disney, I agree piracy is far more ethical than a subscription.

  • ickplant@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Like many said, it’s not about profitability but sustainability. I signed up to donate $2 per month to help run the servers for lemmy.world. I’m very happy with this instance (and the fediverse in general) and want to contribute. There are plenty of other people willing to do the same. Together, we will make something much bigger and better than reddit over time.

    I love their $8/month tier description: “The $8 verified user tier. You’ll be allowed to place a blue checkmark behind your name. You’ll have to do that yourself though. And you could also do that without donating ;-).”

  • irkli@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It takes money to run, but it doesn’t need money to “be”.

    Imagine a group of people rent a building to hang out in; of you’re a regular you chip in some bucks. Lots of people, a few bucks each, roof over your head.

    Get out of that “free” mindset. It was a trap all along. Some of us old pharts have known this, some of us (not me) have been coding stuff like Lemmy and other open software all along.

    Right away i knew Lemmy.world was viable; I’m gladly paying 5 bucks/mo! No ads! No corporate extraction of personal data!

    Hell, pay TWO bucks a month. Seriously wtf 2 bucks you could lose and not notice.

    • NutWrench@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Yup. You can be profitable without expecting to get rich. The insane corporate expectations of “20% growth every year forever” directly leads to the enshitification of everything it touches, especially social media.

    • CosmoNova@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This is the real question we have to ask ourselves. We really need to move away from looking at the internet as just a resource to extract money from, and instead see it through a social lense again. Look what late stage capitalism has done to our digital, social gathering places. Almost everything has become a product that needs to be profitable, to compete for attention and to extract as much data from users as possible and discourse has suffered greatly from it. I mean billions are donated to content creators simply because people want to contribute. Why stop there? We can shape the internet the way we want if we simply contribute and put our heads together. We don’t have to make a profit. That’s our strength.

      • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        I like this take.

        Due to life circumstances, I basically live on the internet, and have since the late 90s. My first comment on here was about how I support socialized social media.

        I want to go back to a time when I could actually talk to random people, and have meaningful discourse, even if it isn’t as big of a community or as content-filled. I want my social space to be interactive, not passive.

        Profit-seeking models push for passive consumption rather than actual meaningful engagement. I’d much rather have a non-profitable platform that people keep alive because they want the same thing I do. I’ll donate to it, as long as it stays that way.

      • queermunist@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Profit is the money leftover after everything has been paid for, though. All profit is, by definition, excess.

        You’re probably right and the OP is just confusing terms, but I think it’s an important distinction to make.

  • m88youngling@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it’s illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That’s not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it’s what I want and enjoy, and for right now it’s affordable, and I’m happy with that.

      • m88youngling@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It costs me roughly $15-25 a month to host our game server, but I have other costs like our website that I’m dealing with as well, so taking all those other things into account and I’m probably spending something like $30 a month for now. I’m actively working to migrate my Wix site to WordPress to save money. Now, if we had thousands of concurrent users instead of like 30-40 concurrent users on a typical day, or if we needed significantly more storage, my costs would probably go up a lot. The growing storage and user count are both important things I’m thinking about carefully, because I imagine there might come a time I need to reevaluate our strategy

  • Twilight@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m pretty sure Lemmy has been designed specifically so it can’t me monetized. If you try to place ads people can just switch to another instance. If you try to split off from the fediverse I’m pretty sure there’s enough data on other instances in order to clone your server along with its content (and mind that you don’t own the copyright for posts made by users).

    • Hexophile@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I would go as far as to say the point is that it’s not for profit. Profit incentive ruins everything, most of all online services and platforms.

      • Twilight@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I think it’s more than just “not for profit” - there was actual effort to make this platform as difficult to monetize as possible (probably as a lesson learned from Reddit lol). Let’s begin with the code - it’s under AGPL, which means you can’t set up a public Lemmy instance without making its code public. This prevents you from creating an improved version and keeping it to yourself to gain an advantage over other instances. Second, the fediverse means that it’s less likely for a single instance to become so big that it can unfederate itself without consequences, and while you’re federated you can’t really place ads - people would just view your community on another instance.

        • jvisick@programming.dev
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          1 year ago

          I don’t agree - while you could copy it, if an instance gathered a large user base and had some well-implemented quality of life features, there’s nothing stopping them from putting ads on it and I’d guess that most users would continue to use that instance. If it has quality content, they already have an account, and it has compelling improvements over other instances, I can’t imagine that some unobtrusive ads would bother people enough to go to a clone of that instance and create another account.

          Sure, it could be done, and ad blockers are common enough, but I don’t think well-placed ads would cause some mass exodus. I’d even be okay with it if it’s in the name of paying the server bills for such an instance.

  • dan1101@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    It doesn’t have to be profitable. Especially for people that already have computers running 24/7 and good Internet, a Lenny server is just another process they run on their machine. Admin/mod duties would probably be the hardest part.

    • Whoresradish@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The open collective link goes to Mastadon world. Is it related to Lemmy.world? I look on lemmy.world website, and I don’t see a clear link to funding.

      • kenblu24@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Run by the same people. Donations to that link are used for both.

        Some have raised concerns about wanting to fund one but not the other (e.g. earmark their donation to Lemmy but not Mastodon) but the admins said they weren’t gonna do that yet.

  • 🦥󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠󠀠@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The funny thing is that not all human endeavours actually need to be profitable for them to exist. It’s perfectly fine and normal for people to be generous and provide services for the community for nothing in return and for some of those in the community to help out too.

    • thawed_caveman@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m going to split a hair here: any endeavour needs to be financially sustainable for it to continue existing. So yes, in terms of future growth of federated platforms, i am mildly concenrned that there may not be enough people willing to put in the work and expense of maintaining an instance just so free. If you imagine a future where the fediverse has Twitter or Instagram levels of users, it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?

      • cley_faye@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?

        why is that “pretty likely”? People have been running services 24/7 for years, sometimes out of pocket, sometimes with basic community support. It does not have to be profitable, as you said, it has to be sustainable, which is vastly different.

      • DiachronicShear@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible

        I disagree. It’s find to have hobbies that don’t make money. Running a lemmy instance can be that.

  • ClarkDoom@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.

    • AttemptNo209@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      What’s the general consensus as far as fear for future profiteering? Right now these platforms are great because the are run by people who genuinely care. Do you think there is any risk of this growing so much that federated content reaches the front page of search engines, followed by advertisers wanting space here? Or what about risks like reddit gold which was initially just a fun add on, which then became a “temporary” paid feature, which ended as a full scale scam.

      Anyway, I love what we have for now, I just want to know what everyone else is speculating for the future.

      • Rentlar@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Meta, a well-known for-profig company are gearing up to join the Fediverse, reaction is mixed, some server operators seem keen on welcoming them, some cautiously optomistic while others want nothing to do with Meta at all.

        In terms of paid features, might be a thing down the line but it will very from server to server. Cool extra statuses (e.g. Wow I’m a gold tier superstar supporter on this instance) likely won’t appear on other instances unless they decide to include something in the federation protocol that would display it.

  • Vincent St. Pierre@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I am a proud monthly donor. My couple of bucks I send Ruud and the admin team every month helps make this corner of the internet a reality.

    So, that’s how it’s funded.

    If you’re able, please consider sending in a donation. You can do so at Open Collective or Patreon.

    • Drunemeton@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Help out a sprout?

      Both those links go to Mastodon not Lemmy. Am I right in assuming that your account Is on an instance that hosts both? Probably federating with M before feasting with L next?

        • Phil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          You’ll also notice that donations are going down every month. That’s to be expected, number of active users has also gone down, until end of may, when it stabilized. We expext donations to stabilize as well, and if they won’t we’ll post a message asking for people to donate if they can/want

          If only they knew…

    • Fleeing_snail@sopuli.xyz
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      1 year ago

      I didn’t know you could support lemmy via patreon. Thanks for the info! I’m going to start donating right now!

  • simple@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They’re not, it’s just donations so far. Reddit actually used to profit from donations only too about 10+ years ago and had a bar showing how much they earned every day vs how much they need to run the servers.

    • Labototmized@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I wasn’t aware of this! I was reading through these comments and thinking that would be nice to have here too. It would echo the nice amount of transparency if something like this was implemented. Are there any downsides to showing this info?

      • Botree@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The only downside is that it’s bad for business. Donations will naturally slow down once users see that revenue > expenses, or users will start expecting some extra features to be added with the extra funds etc, which they rightfully should.

        It’d operate like a NGO would and should but as a for-profit business (which is not ideal since they wouldn’t be regulated and audited as an NGO). Even if it does register as NGO, the show runners still get to decide their wages at the end of the day. And what’s stopping them from inflating the figures shown to users? They could say it costs $2m for overheads and pay themselves $1.5m as wages.

  • TheSpookiestUser@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They aren’t. Do they need to be, though? Maybe once the scale gets gargantuan, but even then - is it strictly necessary to be profitable? As long as donations cover costs, I assume most instance administrators want what the rest of us want - a good platform for discussion and content aggregation.

    • Cybermass@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree with this sentiment, there are a lot of admins who are very virtuous and and will pay money out of pocket and dedicate time to this cause which is appreciated. The big thing in the beginning is the actual time it takes to run an instance, when servers get big they are going to need employees, no one can be on call 24/7 for something that costs them money (with the exception of a child).

      Once Lemmy has around a million active users funding the actual server costs will become a problem but I’m sure people will figure out how to make money off of it well before then, wether it be ads, data selling, alternative services, subscription models or something else.

      Whats important right now is that as a community we do what we can to keep this place alive, and to help out the hard working admins.

  • A Phlaming Phoenix@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    They’re not, and profit isn’t the reason people run Lemmy instances. In fact, avoiding the problems that arise when human communication is capitalized upon is a driving theme behind open source software and federated social media.

    • agitatedpotato@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Its been so long since ive been on a part of the internet like this, it used to be almost all like this, now its almost all a buisness.

      • Sota4077@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Right. I’m loving this. It is a huge breath of fresh air. Obviously the people hosting Lemmy.world have to pay for this though. If they put out a subscription that was minimal in cost I would pony up even now with the jank and all. This place is worth investing my time and energy into I feel.

    • sriracha_no_big_deal@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Profit might not be the point, but it is going to cost time and resources to run an instance. Unless the admin is just planning on paying for everyone’s ability to use Lemmy on their instance out of their own pocket, ads or subscriptions may be necessary. And depending on how much time and effort goes into keeping it up, it wouldn’t be unreasonable for them to want to make a profit on it so they feel like it’s worth the effort.

      I’d hate for an instance to blow up in popularity only for the admin to decide it isn’t worth the time/effort/cost and shuts it down.