Fediverse

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else's?

ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they're using. Oh, the humanity.

Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.

Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.

Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.

I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what's going on with the donated money.

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

I don't know if it's the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it's not clear I just hold my money.

But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially "user donations". For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don't think that's going to change as most people don't have that much disposable income anyway.

I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don't get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as "less centralized", truly decentralized model should be p2p. I've said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it's a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.

I think a model that the burden is smaller and more spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.

Also I take the chance to put up a critique on domain costs, it's not much, but it's part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don't know if there's any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.

@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?

If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?

The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven't even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the "server" is a hive of users' computers all sharing the load? I'm a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?

Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket.

Wtf!?

i know most of ao3's budget goes to server costs. they get by with volunteer labor and donations, but they mostly host text. i genuinely have no idea what a sustainable model would look like for the fediverse, that doesn't just treat volunteers like disposable rags we toss when they get inevitable burnout.

start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.

what is so difficult here?