Lemmy is like a public library of the internet: it's one of the few places where you can exist without the expectation of paying either through watching ads or through direct payments

A library is paid though.

Donate to your instance, and decentralize the Fediverse.

Do you mean by taxes?
- Where i come from you can go there and read for free, but if you want to borrow stuff you need to have a card which is paid my an abo.
  
  And they will also get money by the city likely
It's not even expensive. A single euro monthly per user is more then enough to keep instances running
- The problem is that micro-payments are a pain in the ass. On Liberapay I often pay people 2 years in advance which is then pretty much

Of course, people should donate to make Lemmy sustainable.
I recognize that this is true of any website that is not enshitified or, more broadly, is designed to maximize profits. Websites made with libre software are the public libraries of the internet!

It's like a public library that lets you borrow and read books from other cities' libraries!

Yes, we have interlibrary loan.
- Instant interlibrary loan!
- Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization
  
  -Jo Walton, Among Others
I'm pretty sure most libraries also have that.
That's called interlibrary loan and it predates the internet by a long time.

1876 officially. Unofficially, centuries before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlibrary_loan
But it doesn't have lots of useful stuff that makes people want to come here :(

I'm paying for the hosting of my single user instance.

What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
- Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it's not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
  
  Lemmy's issue is that it's non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.
- Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.
  
  What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month
  
  Lemmy
  
  Mastodon
  
  PeerTube
  
  my ruby on rails website + blog
  
  my old PHP website + blog
  
  another old PHP blog
  
  my sisters PHP website
  
  my sisters static website
  
  Firefox Sync server
  
  my bands static website
  
  a matrix server with some bridges
  
  a syncthing instance
  
  a TTRSS instance
  
  another static website
  
  and I probably forgot some things.
- My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
You've got a good point: the showerthought kinda breaks down in some cases, like yours! I guess the showerthought applies to public instances such as lemmy.ml

Don't know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:

Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It's made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent's vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.

A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.

In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens "cross-polinate" each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.

Hosting is not free.

neither is running a library
- No but Lemmy is not publicly funded so people should send them a few bucks every now and then.
People should tip their servers, what they can afford.

It's worth it
No one said it was?

I did a 1 time donation to my instance and the devs that should cover more than a few years of me watching ads.

It's weird though because I really value the idea of supporting projects I like but I find it so hard to part with money when I am not forced. This does become easier as I become more financially stable.

I feel gross hording money at this point. I buy a lot of shit for my hobbies but I hate buying fast food and usually just buy two and give the second away as punishment for the sin.

I'm getting weird in my old age.
To be honest with myself, I am kind of the same. For the lemmy devs and lemmy.world, there are 1€ / month tiers on patreon. Its not that much but at the very least its more than nothing.

Libraries are paid for by taxes

Imagine an international tax founded fediverse with Lemmy, Mastodon, peertube and others. My personal dream.
Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
- Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
  
  I dunno about where you live, but where I live libraries are funded by millage. We vote to fund the libraries specifically with a tax. So if we didn’t have the libraries, we wouldn’t pay that millage.
  
  Taxes would still be collected, but not THAT tax.
- Even if we were to accept that at face value, it does not change the fact that libraries are paid for by taxes, which was my exact statement. My point was not what you seem to interpret in any case. My point, if any, was that we get a lot of really cool stuff for taxes... And also that, as most other things, they are not actually free.

"You mean it just exists so people can share shitposts and memes? No engagement goals to please advertisers and shareholders?"

It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.

(Self aware double entendre in that statement)

I just need a place to shitpost for stress relief, I get drawn into deeper discussions but my main goal is to be as thoughtless and as dumb as possible Wheeeeeeeee

You even get the homeless guy watching porn here.

I think a federation of smaller hobby run sites is going to be the only way to avoid the commercialised Internet, and all the negatives it involves.

that is how the internet started initially
- Yep. I was around in the mid 90's. Which was around when it became generally affordable to get internet at home.
  
  I'd say most stuff was running from university computers though. Normal people couldn't afford to have a permanent connection (even 64k) at home and in the few places co-location existed it was priced out of reach of normal people (and so were the servers you could install).
  
  But it was still not even slightly commercialised.

You do need to donate

I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
Well no, otherwise it wouldn't be a donation
We need tax money
- God no

Well, if you want your instance to stay up you should expect to pitch in for operating costs...

I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That's 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.

If everyone donated 12€ a year then they'd be so flush with cash that it'd make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.
I ensure my instance stays up, by running my own :)

/me taking a 3 hour sink shower in the bathroom

Mfer people got heroin to do! Wtf is taking so long?

You might however be watching ads. And probably not realize it.
(Although, to be fair, right now we're probably much too small for anyone to bother doing much astroturfing)

Even if there was astroturfing, I wouldn't say that counters OP's arguments any more than it would if some guy came in and started handing out coupons to a pizza place in the local public library.

The irony of my app having (well, trying to) ads is not lost on me.

Yeah... Having ads in an app for FOSS software automatically makes it shit-tier for me. Even if they are blocked. I just really hate ads though.

You pay with engagement. !

Hear me out. Are we sure that European admins can't ask for national or European funds to run a Lemmy instances?

Can I use the printer?

There are no Krishna people, either. Does anyone else remember seeing them outside the Boston Public Library in Copley Square back in the early 80s?

Who are the Krishna people?
- They were so sinister, but back in the 80s they were just randos. There's a documentary out there about their cult. Really weird, from my perspective, because when I was like 9 years old, I thought it might be nice to be like them at the airport runnning around with a tambourine. I'm so glad I wasn't. Anyway, look it up and read about them. Then, question everything. The Krishna people, in a nutshell, were worshipping a huge drug lord and it was a mafia, that brainwashed them. Back in the 80s, and even 70s, they were just hippy dippy people. John Waters even made a film about how the daughter wanted to run away from the mother to join the Krishna people. Hare, hare krishna!

Wrong. You are expected to give me 10% of your wages via carrier pigeon or face consequences.

…yet.

I agree. Same as public libraries, someone pays for it, either through work or through money. So people should always donate to their instance if they are able to. Otherwise they are actively promoting the opposite: closed source, for profit, walled gardens.

Well put

you can use open source apps for youtube and reddit, you dont even need to register or watch any of the ads. however yoz get promoted posts that are upvoted by bots, pretty sure its true here as well.

For now...

I am curious about a few of your worst case expectations.
- Admins secretly taking money to inject stealth ads? I don't know the mechanisms too well but it'd be nice to know where the cancer is likely to start from.