this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Lemmy will die out without monotization such as every 6th post being an ad.
I love it but feel like libre projects that have constant maintenance costs beyond developers' time need to find ways to become mostly self sustainable without relying on donations. I also dont mind less than 20% of the posts being ads.
All you need to run a lemmy instance is a bit of time, a computer and an internet connection though, same as running any forum. The costs of all those are rapidly decreasing over time and are well within "eh who cares i'll just pay it" ranges; a smaller instance can easily be run for less than 5-10 bucks a month on the cloud, or for the cost of electricity if you have an old PC lying around.
A lot of costs of keeping servers running is employing people to do it; if its not too much hassle to keep one maintained, people will keep servers online.
Source: I run datacenters and support various cloud apps
Wouldnt you need an increasing amount of storage over time, including backup/redundency solutions in case of hardware failure? Who stores all the posts/comments?
Also, what about bigger instances, that will keep growing the more popular lemmy gets?
Yes, but it's not just 1 instance you have to worry about. For this to go well, dozens even hundreds of instances have to stay around. If we start losing large chunks of our history or some parts go down here and there it's not going to survive. This is my third account due to how many issues I was having posting weeks back with the different major instances being overloaded. Even then, most of the posts I'm interacting with are hosted there and from time to time there are errors.
Also Images are a huge burden.
I just embrace impermanence. Fediverse is not much other than some other person's server, and if the instance owner decides he doesn't want to host his instance anymore, you're just gonna have to cut your losses and move somewhere else. It's not as if the entirety of Lemmy is gonna stop existing at once.
The real threat to Lemmy's existence is the maintenance of the software. If that stops, there are 2 options, either someone forks it, or the medium slowly dies out as no one feels like hosting outdated software anymore.
In that case (which, might I add, is unlikely to happen), you're gonna have to cut your losses, and move to a different type of social media
I'm less concerned with instances going away, although that would be annoying if it happened frequently. I'm most concerned with performance. When you have to rely on a web of different hosts to be all fully working at the same time for the experience to be smooth there are going to be more problems inevitably.
You just described the internet lol
Twenty years ago maybe. Since then there have been a handful of sites that most people visit, and in the last 15 years or so they hardly ever went down.
I'm guessing you don't work for a large corp if you think sites don't go down or have backend issues all the time lol
Iโm talking about on a regular basis or for long.
4 upvotes, mission failed successfully
Interesting. Talking to individuals about it, they never agreed with me.
Looks like it got fixed now.
Wouldn't personally mind myself either, but I don't think it has to be every 6th post, rather than just being placed somewhere that are slightly prominent (like the not-so-used sidebar) but not overly distracting, like how ads used to work. That ad space can change over time, to show other ads if need to be.
Instance owners should have complete freedom on how they can deliver ads...regardless of what instance is used to access it. The frequency and the type of ad is important. The ad should be at least relevant to that instance. The ad should at least be what the owners consider worthy to be endorsed, to be curated.
I mean... The good thing about being federated is that, if someone wants, they can make more space for users.
Mastodon has a far bigger user base and hasn't died out without ads, why would Lemmy?
Im not sure what are its income resources, but never the less - mastadon is still quite a niche site. Not nearly as big as reddit or X.
Mastodon has millions of users now, and it's a whole ecosystem of sites that have been running on user donations for many years now. The whole idea behind federation is that it's distributed. With Reddit or X, all the users are on the same site, so a single host has to be able to deal with that volume. However, with distributed systems no single server needs to grow too big. Most servers have a few thousand users on them, and hosting costs for that are pretty reasonable. Only a small percentage of the users have to chip in to keep things running.
Well, time will tell.