How is Lemmy going to make money?

If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit's daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don't think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn't to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

elight,

How about "let's support kbin. Lemmy is a tire fire waiting to happen as it seems to be written by tankies."

mstrbtr, (edited )
mstrbtr avatar

Jesus this got massdownvoted by Lemmy tankies! xD Luckily there isn't the same impact on Kbin when viewing the OG comment.

fruitywelsh,

Down voted because if the code is good, then you can fork it if the maintainers really get out of hand. I'm very opposed to the CCP personally.

mstrbtr,
mstrbtr avatar

From the information in the OG reply it seems pretty out of hand to me though, which makes the switch to Kbin that much easier as it's just plain better, and have full functionality to interact with microblogs. If Lemmy was the only one it would makes sense to fork it if needed, but now we have like 3 reddit-like fediverse platforms that we can choose between.

themadcodger,
themadcodger avatar

What's the 3rd platform?

mstrbtr,
mstrbtr avatar

It is called lotide. You can read about it here https://sr.ht/~vpzom/lotide/ , I guess there is also a 4th one called prismo, but the developer put down their project for various reasons, so i don't count it in.

themadcodger,
themadcodger avatar

Oh that's right. I remember seeing it at one point but immediately dismissing it because of the interface. I could see how that would apply to some, but I'm definitely more of a kbin/Calckey kind of guy.

Kierunkowy74,
Kierunkowy74 avatar

5th is Brutalinks

Kichae,

And Friendica has full groups support, AFAIK, so it functions like an inverse kbin, focusing the microblogging but giving full group access.

Kichae,

We should encourage more, frankly. Misskey has exploded in forks, and it's meant good things.

So long as they're interoperable, the diversity in experiences is good for all of us.

mstrbtr,
mstrbtr avatar

True!

BackOnMyBS,
BackOnMyBS avatar

I only see 2 downvotes...omg I can see downvote counts!

mstrbtr,
mstrbtr avatar

Update: Now there are 16 downvotes on Lemmy, but like 1 upvote. While on Kbin 18 upvotes. xD

@buda @elight

cbt,

@elight @buda I support this message 😅

elight,

Yet our messages were removed from the thread.

Seems to make my point for me. They're hiding who they are.

knova,

Your messages are still visible.

elight,

Oh, I'm wrong. I appear to be sort of banned but with no notification or warning. I can see the content here when no authenticated. When I authenticate, I see no comments on this post. Cute. And lousy moderation.

cbt,

@elight

Ooh! Right! I was wondering if there was stuff that hadn't been updated for my end. lol

That is quite bad though.

Speaks volumes about the Lemmy maintainers as you haven't really done anything wrong. 😅 (As they are the moderators of the group and the entire lemmy.ml instance.)

@buda

elight,

Help me out here. If I can't see this thread on kbin.social when logged into kbin.social, doesn't that mean that Earnest, the dev/instance owner of kbin.social, is attempting to ban me from it?

I was able to comment by viewing the thread incognito in Safari and commenting by direct linking to reply to your comment. kbin.social doesn't yet prevent this.

I wonder if/when I'll get IP-banned for being skeptical of the dev/instance owner?

MBM,

That sounds more like a bug than anything intentional, since all your comments are still here

Venus,

I love it when people get banned but somehow they're still commenting on the same post which got them banned with absolutely no problems. Sounds like a very real ban.

elight,

No. Just really weak moderation tools, so far. Here'a some proof for you. Best I can do on my iPhone. I can send one from my PC later if it's not clear enough that I'm logged in and can't see comments. I can't see yours either via permalink. I copied the reply-to permalink to my logged in browser to get this to work.

Austin-Philp,
Austin-Philp avatar

Currently commenting this from kbin - honestly I love it, much more flexible than Lemmy, you can still use all Lemmy content and you can access Mastadon through it!

orbit,

You may have just convinced me to try it out. A few questions though: Does it have any limitations when accessing content on other Fediverse clients? Like anything goofy when looking at lemmy content for instance? Second is there an Android app available you could recommend? Third, what instances are cool to start with?

themadcodger,
themadcodger avatar

I've pretty much only been using Kbin instead of Lemmy and I really haven't run into any problems. The dev just fixed the weird thing where upvotes here did nothing on Lemmy, you had to favorite it instead. But that's gone after users requested it.

There isn't a native app yet but one is in development (near the bottom). It is a newer platform compared to Lemmy (same as Calckey compared to mastodon) but personally I like the UI better. Plus the native integration to mastodon is nice. I've been using it as a PWA for the time being and haven't had any real issues, but I'm waiting for an app as well 😅

Being new, I'm on the main instance kbin.social. It's still small and there aren't many instances yet. Hopefully that will change. But nice thing about the fediverse is you can try it out and see what fits for you. Hell, you could join Friendica (FB equivalent) and access this content there if that floats your boat. So give it a try and see what you like!

orbit,

Alright you convinced me and I made an account. I love that it more effectively interfaces with the rest of the fediverse. Is there a better search function though? I'd love to follow some official Mastodon users like Reuters or Ars Technica but the main search doesn't let me filter for specifics.

themadcodger,
themadcodger avatar

At this stage in development, things aren't quite robust yet. That said, much like email where you have to know someone's address before you can add them, it's a bit like that here.

If you search for @arstechnica@mastodon.social it'll show up and you can follow them from kbin. Same process for communities on Lemmy.

FaceDeer,

Oh, nice. I was hoping I'd see something like this, it's an open protocol so complete alternative implementations to accomplish Reddit-like functionality is great. Nobody can rest on their laurels or assume that they get to decide what features are allowed.

Outsider,

One thing I'm wondering about is, how to discover kbin instances? There's a spot on the website to encourage people to create their own instances, but how do people find them? I mean if the developer is able to fund to keep his own website open then I guess it doesn't matter, but I assume if he's encouraging people to create their own instances it might be worthwhile to have people be able to find these instances.

Edit: Found it. I had looked all over the website for something to show what instances it was federated with (like how Lemmy has it on the bottom) but I couldn't find it, but I clicked on dev's kbin account and its in his profile.

https://the-federation.info/platform/184

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Kbin has a site similar to join-lemmy.org on https://kbin.pub

themadcodger, (edited )
themadcodger avatar

Yeah, that is one thing to consider, but kbin is much newer than Lemmy, so has some things to work out still. But that said I've had no problems with it so far.

edit Forgot to mention, instances are mentioned on the official website.

Kaldo,
Kaldo avatar

That's been my journey so far, I first joined beehaw because I like the community but after reading more about lemmy, admins and lemmygrad it gave me a really sour taste in my mouth. Glad to have found kbin as an alternative with the same design idea, hopefully the recent popularity boost helps the development in the long term.

jackissocool,

@elight
Tankies are right
@buda

honk,

I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don't think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don't end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.

Senseibull,

Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API

As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits

PorkrollPosadist,

There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of active users, and none of them are ad supported. Donations generally are capable of paying the operating expenses, as long as the staff is halfway decent at creating a space that people appreciate.

Lemmy_2019,

I'm not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.

Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.

Xune531,

Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.

sam_uk,

I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.

Avian_Carrier,

Please make mod tools a top priority. It's absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.

nutomic,
@nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

Contributions welcome.

Avian_Carrier,

deleted_by_moderator

    •
    lmorchard,

    Bud, this is like going to someone's house for a party and complaining that they don't have your favorite beer. How about you go for a beer run?

    Avian_Carrier,

    That's not even remotely the same and everyone that upvoted you is just as stupid. If you think mod tools are in a great state, you're also delusional. Sorry you have such low standards to agree with the lazy admins releasing software that wasn't ready.

    jerrimu,

    we just think you're a prick, this isnt about what you're saying, it's about how you're saying it

    nutomic,
    @nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

    Lemmy is not a company, it's built by volunteers. If you want a corporate platform go to Reddit.

    Avian_Carrier,

    deleted_by_moderator

    •
    xrthat,

    Ah and here comes the toxicity along with the reddit flood.

    Lemminary,

    For real, I'm back today after a couple of days and there are so many removed comments. Why can't we have nice things, people? groans

    Copio,

    I honestly can't tell if

    removed by mod

    was removed by mod, or just an italicized removed by mod.

    AbelianGrape,

    My browser is set to default to French (which I speak / am still learning) and to me it says

    supprimé par le modérateur

    so this one is real. A visual distinction could be nice, that might be a decent newcomer contribution to the codebase.

    jackalope,

    @dessalines good user feedback here.

    lemann,

    I'm not sure if that actually tagged them.. you might need to append @lemmy.ml to it. testing @nutomic

    testing 2 @lemmy.ml@nutomic@lemmy.ml

    Avian_Carrier,

    Ban me now you cunt. You've more sensitive than Spez and I didn't think that was even possible.

    nutomic,
    @nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

    As you wish.

    CannotSleep420,

    Hell, even if it isn't strictly a mod tool, being able to do this from someone's profile page would be good.

    Avian_Carrier,

    Wholeheartedly agree

    communick,

    28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.

    nutomic,
    @nutomic@lemmy.ml avatar

    I don’t know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.

    communick,

    The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

    I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

    00111000,

    The good news is we've seen this before with Mastodon.

    Not only did we see an influx of monthly donations, we saw admins expand the needs of their servers in real-time with the help of the community.

    After having witnessed that in the midst of the bird migration, I have no concerns with how Lemmy will handle the inevitable influx when it comes to uptime and finances.

    blackard,

    I immediately started contributing to Fosstodon’s Patreon and I will be happy to do the same here!

    smstnitc,

    What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That's where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there's a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.

    jdp23,
    @jdp23@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

    Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.

    hyperhopper,

    No different than when voat went down or when Reddit goes down eventually. The goal is though that by having no big central point of failure it's not as big of a deal. Not like you'd have to get used to a whole new kind of thing, just move to another instance.

    Vega,
    @Vega@feddit.it avatar

    IMHO, the problem is more subtle: nothing on the internet will stay forever, if you find a piece of information you like to save forever, you should save it locally AND with something like internet archive. A community can transfer to the same community in another server with proper forewarning. Finally, mastodon introduced the ability to move your account to another istance manteining your followers for quite a while now, maybe lemmy can find a way to introduce something like that too

    RagingNerdoholic,

    That's definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It's basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it's associated with goes down with it.

    It's a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.

    Deebster,
    @Deebster@beehaw.org avatar

    I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?

    RagingNerdoholic,

    Good question. Not sure what the best procedure might be here. Could be as simple promoting them in order of initial mirror deployment dates and the others become mirrors for the newly activated instance.

    Triggering the activation could be a part of an instance decommissioning procedure where the operator selects the mirror to become the successor. Maybe there could be some basic system specs and network performance reporting so they could choose the optimal instance. Users would receive a message that their account is being moved to another instance and domain.

    In the event of an unexpected outage, there could be a deadman switch style timeout where the fastest mirror activates automatically after the original instance is out for long enough, but also a process for the operator of the downed instance to delay the takeover by signaling, "I'm working on it." In the event of automatic takeover, since users wouldn't be able to receive messages, there would have to be some sort of global lemmy notice system so users of the downed instance know where to go, like a sticky post on the front page or maybe just a separate "notices" page.

    HexTrace,

    Definitely need some kind of replication/mirroring to occur between instances for DR, I was looking at how other decentralized systems for inspiration. Something like RAID where it's tolerant of one or two drive failures could be translated to Lemmy. When you set up a new instance it allows you to opt-in to a peer network where you host backup content from several other instances and your instance is backed up to several other (non-overlapping) instances.

    dessalines,

    When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

    If you'd like to help us out, here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

    Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we're working on something worthwhile.

    aianarchist,

    What is the difference between librepay and opencollective that makes you choose librepay? I'm hoping to review these platforms.

    dessalines,

    Liberapay is simpler, automatically splits payment between devs, and has no fees (other than the payment processor). They're even funded by their own model.

    Opencollective isn't as good because you have to submit invoices to get paid.

    Patreon is absolutely the worst because it's not made for teams, and they take a big cut for essentially just running a wordpress for you with payment buttons.

    Crackhappy,
    @Crackhappy@lemmy.world avatar

    Thanks for all that you do. Signed up for recurring donations!

    MedicPigBabySaver,

    Just sent $44... My fav #.

    ToastyWaffles,

    I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!

    Riyria,

    Just downloaded Jerboa last night so I have something to browse when I delete the reddit app during the black out. The collapse/expand tool is honestly something that would have made me avoid the app, so thank you for your service lmao.

    aianarchist,

    I recommend explicitly listing yourself as a coop now and in perpetuity, I give big props to that!

    DivergentHarmonics,

    You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology ... eventually.

    dessalines,

    For sure. I think all three of those ones we list are transparent, and really the main cost is just our labor time. Server / infrastructure / devops costs are minimal.

    jackissocool,

    I'm proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7

    dessalines,

    o7

    krolden,
    @krolden@lemmy.ml avatar

    Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?

    dessalines,

    This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they're been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don't think we'll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.

    Lemminary,

    Your heart is in the right place, man <3

    Venus,

    Liberapay is much preferred

    Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that's separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it's preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.

    dessalines,

    We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I'll make sure that's in there.

    JoeBidet,
    @JoeBidet@lemmy.ml avatar

    like the rest of the Fediverse: through ingeniosity, community and self-organization!

    (understanding "make money" as "pay for its infrastructure and maybe for some dev and other of the essential work now ran by volunteers" not as "profit")

    j4yc33,
    j4yc33 avatar

    If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you've missed the point. It's federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.

    The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it's interconnected, it's self-managing, and it will scale only until it can't and then it will peacefully split.

    DivergentHarmonics,

    ?

    ywein,

    Servers are not free. You can run instance on a VPS for 20$ when you have 200 users.
    What will you do when it will grow to 200 thousand users? You have to make money somehow to finance that, be it ads, paid subscriptions or donations or whatever else.

    animist,
    @animist@lemmy.one avatar

    You should orobably read what OP wrote instead of just the title

    Bizarroland,
    Bizarroland avatar

    If you have ever browsed sites like questionablecontent.net, you may have noticed that they have a privately hosted ad server where people can reach out to Jeph and buy ads for his site.

    This is a fairly rare occurrence as the requirements for the ads that he approves are pretty strict from what I understand and he's not just going to hawk the latest caffeinated Seltzer vitamin water blend to his followers.

    That being said there are a lot of self hosted ad platforms that can be easily monetized and allow the site owner to dictate exactly how intrusive the ads are where the ads are coming from and to ensure that the ads effectively blend into their site design.

    But a more realistic approach would be to ask users to pay an annual fee or something.

    If I knew that the community was fairly strong and robust I wouldn't mind paying $10 a year or something to keep my community vibrant and strong, or rather than going with a fixed annual amount if they were to put out a donation drive the way Wikipedia does then I might be tempted to throw a little cash when I'm feeling flush.

    elight,

    deleted_by_author

    •
    zarquon,

    I still see it no problem. Does have a negative net in votes though

    DivergentHarmonics,

    It has been downvoted to the bottom. Divisive behaviour is discouraged. I love it. :-)
    kbin might still be good, though.

    activepeople,

    There's also the option if user-owned cooperative (like social.coop) - https://blog.opencollective.com/social-coop-a-cooperative-decentralized-social-network/

    There are also some masto instances that have their own lemmy instances, funded through their existing funding structures - https://merveilles.town/about

    Krusty,
    @Krusty@feddit.it avatar

    Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There's plenty of ways to make money without VC.

    Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don't know...

    Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that

    fruitywelsh,

    I've always dreamed of, and now with even more Fediverse usage it might be easier to push, to have local municipal governments fund simple sites in the states as part of a pretty standard practice of creating community spaces, and so that local governments can have a site to host accounts without the chance of being censored by big tech in the future.

    rolaulten,

    I empathize with this view - but I doubt this will ever happen. Ignoring the user training bits, and the legal bits (who is a mod, how do they do stuff), you need to have someone dedicated to fighting this though the IT/Security gauntlet. Now keep in mind im private sector (so it's slightly different) - but we in IT generally have dimm views of hosting WebApps.

    All that said. Once one local gov does it the potential for it to spread radically increases.

    Link,
    @Link@lemmy.ml avatar

    Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/

    They do get funding from NLNet

    Krusty,
    @Krusty@feddit.it avatar

    Yes! :)

    seirim,
    @seirim@lemmy.ml avatar

    I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.

    pancake,
    @pancake@lemmy.ml avatar

    Well, it's working right now, isn't it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.

    ywein,

    The majority of the current users are enthusiasts. They usually are significantly more willing to donate compared to average.

    falconfetus8,

    The big migration hasn't happened yet. There's going to be a big spike in new users during the blackout, and then again when Apollo shuts down.

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