No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That’s nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.
Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn’t need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.
I really enjoyed the Reddit gold model. I paid them $30/year for many years because I got so much out of the site that I felt they deserved it. Their monetization was pretty innocuous.
Is the donations don’t cover the bills there are few options.
They usually do. When we opened for donations, we pretty much hit our goals within days and our donations currently exceed our expenses without having to do donation drives. @[email protected] had a thread where Lemmy Admins discussed their costs and a lot are already fully funded.
It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap. When you don’t have to have massive marketing departments, huge management bonuses, expensive office space, crappy proprietary software, and massively scaled highly available platforms it costs a lot less to run a social media platform. Donations can often cover it all.
If one server gets too big, they can just cap registrations and people move to a different server.
And there’s a scaling problem, right? Like, the bigger the federation is, the more traffic each instance gets.
Maybe large institutions (universities, some governments, some companies, and so on) can each host their own instance. It would be a drop in their existing hosting costs.
No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That’s nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.
Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn’t need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.
I don’t want it to have ads either but bandwidth is not free and someone somewhere is paying for it.
Is the donations don’t cover the bills there are few options.
I really enjoyed the Reddit gold model. I paid them $30/year for many years because I got so much out of the site that I felt they deserved it. Their monetization was pretty innocuous.
Then the enshittification happened.
They usually do. When we opened for donations, we pretty much hit our goals within days and our donations currently exceed our expenses without having to do donation drives. @[email protected] had a thread where Lemmy Admins discussed their costs and a lot are already fully funded.
We run one of then largest lemmy server. We’re fully donation-funded. Lemmy.world is also the largest, also donation funded.
It’s not free, but it’s pretty cheap. When you don’t have to have massive marketing departments, huge management bonuses, expensive office space, crappy proprietary software, and massively scaled highly available platforms it costs a lot less to run a social media platform. Donations can often cover it all.
If one server gets too big, they can just cap registrations and people move to a different server.
Good point. Way less staff to keep this service running as long as growth is not a priority like it is with most companies.
At some point they are going to need lawyers, and more expensive anti-spam.
And there’s a scaling problem, right? Like, the bigger the federation is, the more traffic each instance gets.
Maybe large institutions (universities, some governments, some companies, and so on) can each host their own instance. It would be a drop in their existing hosting costs.
You’re getting very close to describing how Usenet works.
Heh, is that a bad thing? I think not.