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Fediverse @lemmy.world
rglullis @communick.news

PSA: Communick is a privacy-focused provider of fediverse instances, pledging to donate 20% of its profits to FOSS projects

With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.

Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.

How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people "group package". Lemmy access is $8/year.

Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:

  • the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
  • Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can't hide under the veil of anonymity.
  • You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won't disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.

Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:

  • I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial...
  • The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won't see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.

Last but not least: I'm offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.

Thank you for your attention, and don't hesitate to ask anything.

33 comments

  • This is a really interesting idea, I'm definitely considering it. I'm already giving on lemmy.world patreon more than your plans cost. I have two questions. First, just from a business perspective, how do you think about differentiating yourself from the donation based servers? Is there something of extra value that people get from your instance and service that they can't get elsewhere?

    I'm also interested in your moderation and federation policies. I think a potential barrier here is paying upfront for a year only to disagree with a federation decision down the line. Maybe you could have different instances with different policies? Like one that is federated with threads, one that isn't, one that's federated with hexbear one that isn't. Maybe that's overly complicated once you start adding up all the different combinations that people come up with (personally I'm fine with threads, meh on hexbear, and a no on explodingheads).

    • Thank you! I've started Communick about 4 years ago as a side-project and today it's the first day that I'm feeling that there are some people that "get it". Now I'm trying to make it my full-time job and the reaction here gives me some hope.

      For your questions:

      • yes, I will be working on integrations that are going to be specific to the flagship and managed instances. Just yesterday I launched a tool that imports your twitter follows to mastodon, which I hope can help people migrating away from there. If you have any other ideas for features you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them.
      • Moderation is always going to be a difficult problem. No matter how we slice it, any decision will make some part of the group unhappy. So far I've been focused more on making sure that the our instances are not the ones causing problems in the fediverse and recommending to block/mute individuals from outside for whatever reason they deem fit. I've also found (so far) that it has been more effective to ask people in our instance to not follow trolls/extremists from outside than to try to argue for an instance-wide ban. But, like I said in the original post, having a paid-instance has done wonders to ensure that all members are there to make the best use of their time and has made things very civil.

      With the Mastodon/Lemmy instances growing, I will certainly have to revisit this approach. I am not planning on keeping multiple instances to cater to the different "factions", but I do believe that one way to solve this will be by letting those that disagree with the "main instance" to create a "fork" into a managed instance. For example, it 50 people are on the flagship instance and they decide that they are not happy with the moderation, they can create their own instance (which I would still be hosting) and apply the rules that they seem fit. Price-wise things wouldn't change and they would be probably happier on a "forked" instance than on the main one.

  • This looks excellent! I'm very interested in the matrix plans, as well as the group plans. I like the combined mastodon & matrix plan.

  • I'm not sure I'm on board. I see why you want it though.

    4/year for all services and a wiki style donation set up?

    OR a yearly price that goes down with usage? If you use the fediverse enough the price goes down to an irrelevant price like $2/y (for all fedi access). So it starts at say 8/year for all services then goes down based off your activity or like every year you have a login. If you don't login it cancels the subscription automatically and if you reactivate your account you're back at 8/year.

    Year one - 8$

    Year two - 6$

    Year three - 4$

    Year four and on - 2$

    And everytime paytime comes around there's an option to donate more if you want to. Maybe with some other benefit? Link up with an app developer and if you donate 10$+ thank you get to pick from a paid app to get for "free"?

    • I like this idea, buying 3 years or something for less sounds nice

    • For the first: I know it's an unpopular opinion, but I don't like the donation-based model for social media instances. I don't think it is fair and I think it's self-limiting.

      For the second: having the price going down with usage might be an interest way to increase "customer loyalty", but it feels a bit like one of those "growth hacks". If I saw someone offering that, I am not sure I'd like it. Also, $2/year might not even be enough to cover operational costs, if you factor in things like media storage and backups.

      Maybe I'd have to find a different price policy for people living in middle/low-income countries and I could entertain the idea of "corporate sponsorships" (e.g, every month there would be one pinned post for someone paying for the visibility) to subsidize users but I guess that the average internet user from any OECD country can well afford $8/year. Don't you?

  • So... I read your post and the website but I still have no idea how any of this works. Please express yourself more clearly; I would suggest starting with “Communick lets you..."

    What I understand from this:

    • I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.
    • You will create and host an instance for me.
    • To create and use an account on “my” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.
    • There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.
    • If I decide to leave and stop paying, I can seamlessly transfer administration of the instance to another paying user. If I leave without a “testament”, it will be left unadministered but its content and basic functionally will remain online for some time.
    • You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

    Is this correct?

    • I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.

      Correct.

      You will create and host an instance for me. To create and use an account on “my” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.

      Incorrect. The $8/year Lemmy plan gives you access to an account in the "flagship instance". To get an an instance just for yourself, you would be looking into the "managed hosting" plans. Managed hosting is something completely differerent, you are in full control of the instance, the rules, who to invite, etc. This means that this offering of course has different price points.

      There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.

      Correct

      You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

      Basically correct, but the important thing is that the idea that I will be donating to the projects related to services I am providing.

      To give a more concrete example: if 30% of the revenue comes from people paying for Lemmy, 40% from Mastodon, 20% from Pixelfed and 10% from Matrix, and if I get $100k in an year profit ( a man can dream), then I will be giving $6k to Lemmy, $8k to Mastodon, $4k to Pixelfed and $2k to the Matrix foundation.

      • Thanks.

        What is the difference between your “flagship instance” and a normal one? You seem to mention

        • professional hosting, which I assume means a fast server and very low downtime, as well as good security and maintenance (such as updates)
        • longevity of the instance
        • lack of spam from local accounts (though I assume you federate similarly to other instances where spam can be posted so that should not matter as much)
33 comments