A library is paid though.
Donate to your instance, and decentralize the Fediverse.
this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Do you mean by taxes?
Where i come from you can go there and read for free, but if you want to borrow stuff you need to have a card which is paid my an abo.
And they will also get money by the city likely
In my city/county, you get a free card if you can prove you live here (show something with your address) Our system will also do fundraisers to supplement the budget from taxes. We almost lost some libraries a gew years ago, but voters remade the local government and they are safer now.
That's sucks.
In my country I'm pretty sure library cards are always free. The card has to be collected in person though.
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NYC libraries are free, but asshole conservatives (but I repeat myself) don't want to fund them.
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- Of course, people should donate to make Lemmy sustainable.
- I recognize that this is true of any website that is not enshitified or, more broadly, is designed to maximize profits. Websites made with libre software are the public libraries of the internet!
It's like a public library that lets you borrow and read books from other cities' libraries!
Yes, we have interlibrary loan.
Instant interlibrary loan!
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization
-Jo Walton, Among Others
I'm pretty sure most libraries also have that.
That's called interlibrary loan and it predates the internet by a long time.
1876 officially. Unofficially, centuries before.
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I'm paying for the hosting of my single user instance.
What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it's not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Lemmy's issue is that it's non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.
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Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.
What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month
- Lemmy
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- my ruby on rails website + blog
- my old PHP website + blog
- another old PHP blog
- my sisters PHP website
- my sisters static website
- Firefox Sync server
- my bands static website
- a matrix server with some bridges
- a syncthing instance
- a TTRSS instance
- another static website
and I probably forgot some things.
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My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
You've got a good point: the showerthought kinda breaks down in some cases, like yours! I guess the showerthought applies to public instances such as lemmy.ml
Don't know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:
Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It's made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent's vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.
A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.
In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens "cross-polinate" each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.
Hosting is not free.
People should tip their servers, what they can afford.
It's worth it
No one said it was?
I did a 1 time donation to my instance and the devs that should cover more than a few years of me watching ads.
It's weird though because I really value the idea of supporting projects I like but I find it so hard to part with money when I am not forced. This does become easier as I become more financially stable.
I feel gross hording money at this point. I buy a lot of shit for my hobbies but I hate buying fast food and usually just buy two and give the second away as punishment for the sin.
I'm getting weird in my old age.
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Libraries are paid for by taxes
Imagine an international tax founded fediverse with Lemmy, Mastodon, peertube and others. My personal dream.
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Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
I dunno about where you live, but where I live libraries are funded by millage. We vote to fund the libraries specifically with a tax. So if we didn’t have the libraries, we wouldn’t pay that millage.
Taxes would still be collected, but not THAT tax.
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"You mean it just exists so people can share shitposts and memes? No engagement goals to please advertisers and shareholders?"
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.
(Self aware double entendre in that statement)
I just need a place to shitpost for stress relief, I get drawn into deeper discussions but my main goal is to be as thoughtless and as dumb as possible Wheeeeeeeee
I think a federation of smaller hobby run sites is going to be the only way to avoid the commercialised Internet, and all the negatives it involves.
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You even get the homeless guy watching porn here.
You do need to donate
I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
Well no, otherwise it wouldn't be a donation
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Well, if you want your instance to stay up you should expect to pitch in for operating costs...
I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That's 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.
If everyone donated 12€ a year then they'd be so flush with cash that it'd make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.
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/me taking a 3 hour sink shower in the bathroom
Mfer people got heroin to do! Wtf is taking so long?
You might however be watching ads. And probably not realize it.
(Although, to be fair, right now we're probably much too small for anyone to bother doing much astroturfing)
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The irony of my app having (well, trying to) ads is not lost on me. 
Yeah... Having ads in an app for FOSS software automatically makes it shit-tier for me. Even if they are blocked. I just really hate ads though.
You pay with engagement. !
Hear me out. Are we sure that European admins can't ask for national or European funds to run a Lemmy instances?
Can I use the printer?
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