How is Lemmy going to make money?

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.
- 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.
  
  Contributions welcome.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
- 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.
  
  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.

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@lemmy.ml 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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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!
  
  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.
- Just sent $44... My fav #.
- Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
  
  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.
- I'm proud to be contributing to development via Liberapay for three years running now o7
  
  o7
- Thanks for all that you do. Signed up for recurring donations!
  
  <3

People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn't, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.
The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don't have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.

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

I'm not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
- Great idea! Surely you could just charge, oh I don't know, $20 million a year for it? That would easily cover operating costs and so much more!
- We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
  
  charge 10 doge per upvote
  
  We think that's a fair price! You just need to optimize your shit, garbage, utterly useless piece of crap app to not SUCK so much!

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.
- 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.
  
  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)?
- 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
- Yep. This has been an issue for Mastodon.
- 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.

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
- 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.
  
  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.
- Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/
  They do get funding from NLNet
  
  Yes! :)

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.

Did mastodon die, without funding?
- Many instance have gone down due to costs being too high
  
  A big issue there has also been single-user admin/mod teams. Running a site of several thousand active users is not something just one or two people can do, especially when you also have to screen remote content that's streaming in.
  You can always shut down user registrations if the server's reaching the point of financial sustainability.
  
  There are more Mastodon instances now than ever before. Even though the active user count has been a pretty flat line for a few months now the number of new servers continues to increase week to week.
  
  This is why I'm a communist.

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

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

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.
- Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.
  And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.
  
  @dessalines @honk I'm all about donating to the indy software developer. As a thank you for the quality product, I gave 40 bucks to the developer of NGINX Proxy Manager. It's truly a project above commercial quality.
  
  But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they're using, and the Lemmy devs?
  Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?
  Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?
- 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
  
  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.
  
  Ads would only be useful when hitting the actual instance site in a browser, many (or most) users will use some sort of app I imagine.
- Tip: you need a blank line between the quoted text and the follower for it to separate.
  Try seeing this message's source!
- The real donation is the infrastructure maintained by the many server admins.

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.

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")

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

My prior comment was moderated out of the thread silently?
- I still see it no problem. Does have a negative net in votes though
- It has been downvoted to the bottom. Divisive behaviour is discouraged. I love it. :-)
  kbin might still be good, though.

How about "let's support kbin. Lemmy is a tire fire waiting to happen as it seems to be written by tankies."
- 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!
  
  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?
  
  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
  
  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.
- 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.
- @elight
  Tankies are right
  @buda
- @elight @buda I support this message 😅
  
  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.
  
  Yet our messages were removed from the thread.
  Seems to make my point for me. They're hiding who they are.
- Jesus this got massdownvoted by Lemmy tankies! xD Luckily there isn't the same impact on Kbin when viewing the OG comment.
  
  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.
  
  I only see 2 downvotes...omg I can see downvote counts!
  
  Update: Now there are 16 downvotes on Lemmy, but like 1 upvote. While on Kbin 18 upvotes. xD
  @buda @elight