I’m not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost… So is this place entirely donation based, or what?
Worth mentioning:
- Lemmy itself is an open source software. It’s developed by a community, and was originally created by two developers. It does not make money, except from things like donations or patreon.
- Lemmy instances are run by different members of the community. Various folks have answered ways that instances could make money but may not make money in any ways.
A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.
The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I’d imagine largely pro bono.
I think lemmy.ml was getting money from NLnet by completing Milestones, but now that they’re scrambling to handle bugs and doing Q&A constantly I think they’re losing out on that funding. At least that’s what Dessalines reported, I believe
It’s non profit by default, the very thing that social media needs.
People who run Lemmy servers do it at their own cost. That’s not to say they can’t run ads or choose other ways to become profitable. The big difference between a lemmy instance and something like Reddit is that anyone can start a new instance if the current one goes to shit. If the admins do something the users REALLY don’t like, they can migrate to another instance way more easily than switching platforms.
Reddit is counting on the effort of switching platforms being too high for lemmy to gain traction. They are wrong.
The developers do it for free, which is common in the open source community. There will always be volunteers to build the software and donors to support them.
since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I’ll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it’s own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, !asklemmy@lemmy.ml) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the “real” one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn’t work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it’s a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
I suspect that with time (and support) the Devs will probably introduce account-migration.
Yes, and I think that’s probably a necessity. But that doesn’t help if the server has already gone offline, you’d need notice I expect.
I understand that you can create your same username on another server. Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it’s not already taken. dave@gmail.com and dave@hotmail.com are the same username but different servers. You don’t get dave@gmail.com reserved just because you have dave@hotmail.com, but if it’s available you can register both.
Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Lemmy is pretty young and there aren’t a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people’s accounts.
Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that’s more about moving your followers to your new account. I don’t think the posts move. This page claims there it’s a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn’t have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.
None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.
Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I’ll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it’s software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don’t know what the code is behind Facebook and they don’t want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don’t follow any Meta communities and don’t use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there’s a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Happy to answer further questions!
I patreon $5 month to my server - startrek.website
That’s exactly what I do. But in euros.
deleted by creator
Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it’s basically donations… either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.
But to put into context how much money we’re talking about…
- A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you’re talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
- The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That’s not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn’t take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.
Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course… those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.
It doesn’t make money. It’s funded either by donations, or out of the pockets of the instance owner(s). It doesn’t mean that in the future, an instance owner wouldn’t just decide to start serving ads, I don’t think theres anything stopping them from doing that other than the threat of being defederated by other instances.
That’s the best part, it doesn’t!
You’re spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it
out of the goodness of their heartfor various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, etc).My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it’s a good idea to run your own server.
I’ve been thinking of hosting my own instance for myself, but I was wondering if you’d noticed any oddities! I’ve heard of some bugs that occur when interacting cross-instance. Also stuff about content being out of sync, which I notice currently with lemmy.ml from my current instance (lemmy.world).
Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.
As it turns out, it’s not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you’re interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!
More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they’ve built! They usually don’t have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you’re enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.
TBH I want a option to enable ads to support my instance since I can’t donate money. There should be a way to opt in ads . There will be a lot of people who will be willing to enable it to support their instance.
You getting ads will give them like a dollar a year and you’d absolutely have to have tracking enabled for them to even get that, unpersonalized ads are deemed pretty worthless because you don’t click on things that you aren’t into. The extra power consumption from loading ads + extra spying on you will cost you about as much as the instance would get from it.
If you donate 5 dollars a year, you’re doing more than you would by seeing ads.
They print shitcoins and sell them to dummies.
That’s the problem: it does not make money.
The fediverse mean that the different instances can federate, but every instance after all still has its server and its expenses just like every web service since… always. Forums, chats, socials…
So far donations or pro bono from whoever is managing an instance, but unluckily this is not sustainable if user number skyrocket.
A way would be to somehow make everything p2p but I don’t even know if it’s possible for what is needed.I wouldn’t say that’s a problem, far from it.
