How are lemmy and other fediverse platforms profitable?
Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So... is it all based on donations?
Also don't just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
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Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
I suspect we may also see more instances focused on very specific topics to keep operating cost down.
Agree, and such instances would be more resilient to federation issues. I think communities should be spread out on small instances, while users are concentrated on larger instances with better infrastructure.
I utterly agree.
Would that make you lose your comment history and username? For example I needed to create separate accounts for Beehaw and here. It’s similar to using different forums in the late 90s/early 00s in that way it seems.
If an instance you had an account on went dark, you would lose access to that account, and the ability to view your comment history in isolation. As far as I can tell, the comments you made in communities would exist as long as the instance the community is on exists. Same with your username - there isn't a mechanism for making them globally unique beyond appending the instance domain name (again, just like e-mail).
Beehaw is kind of a special case right now because they have chosen to cut themselves off from a number of other Lemmy instances including lemmy.world. Normally you wouldn't need multiple accounts - I read and post on multiple instances from just my lemmy.world account. You can see remote instance communities under "Communities" / "All". If one you are interested in isn't there, you can search for !community@instance, and wait a bit. That starts the sync of the community to your instance, and you should be able to access it a few minutes later.
I think a good business model is similar to your idea, but with a twist:
Unless accounts become portable across instances, I could see best practices shifting towards users having their own personal instance so that they control it and thus can't lose access to their history etc. But since ain't nobody got time for that, I imagine the business model being companies providing turnkey personal instances and getting paid for hosting and management.
Oh, I definitely see a future where e-mail providers provide fediverse access as part of their service - gmail or iCloud or whatever. There will still be demand for pseudonymous ids, but there's a place for real ids as well.
Being a shared service, Gmail is not what I mean (unless you're talking about Google Workspace, I guess). I'm talking about providing Lemmy hosting for custom domains so each user gets their own instance. Think @cerevant@cerevant.tld instead of @cerevant@lemmy.world: The paid service does the actual hosting and admin tasks, but the user/owner controls the policy (that only applies to himself) and thus can't get booted off, only defederated.
...Hmm, the more I write about this the more it sounds susceptible to the same problem that self-hosted email has (the spammers ruined it, so all the big services preemptively block mail coming from less-than-well-known domains and don't even give them a chance to prove their legitimacy). I kinda feel like it might only work if personal instances became the norm, and wouldn't be tenable if small instances and big instances had to coexist. I guess it just goes to show how many unknowns there are about how the Fediverse will mature and scale.