So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?
I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
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The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don't yet. As per Mark Bayliss:
The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.
I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.
I'm not sure this is what the community wants, or what we should want. The server operators should be able to get enough money to afford operation and cover some of their time investment, but I don't think competing with businesses that obsess over large growth is a worthy goal.
I understand what you’re saying but I do fear that we risk relegating Mastodon and Lemmy into niche apps the same way desktop Linux never got popular. As the linked author noted above, most people don’t care about “free as in speech” or whether a site is open source or not, they just want working social media where they can talk to others.
I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.
I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others... stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt... even with all of their data harvesting and selling.
So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.
Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.
And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.
I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let's say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?
Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).
I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.
Totally agree. Really do not want this to become too popular, because then you get bots, fraud, fake news, trolls and shitposting. Being too small to interest those guys is a good thing.
I think you're missing that point.
If you're paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they're charging their users for the same thing you're giving away for free. Why wouldn't you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that's what would be happening in that situation.
Monetising something that's intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it's a lot harder when it's a service.
I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.
If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there's no excuse to demand money.
That's an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?
I don't think I would have joined my server if it required a fee to join but now that I'm on it and enjoying the experience and administration I'd gladly throw a buck or two a month their way for servers/maintenance.
cheap subscription is probably overboard for my instance
Why would we want to compete
Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.
Were you on reddit 10+ years ago?
Yes
Well, then you're free to go back to there. I do happen to prefer fewer more thoughtful users.
I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you'll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it's a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.
With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn't be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.
Or like I'd imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.