2y ago

Paid Servers?

Are there any paid services for either Lemmy or Mastodon? Something where, given it is a subscription service, you would expect them to stick around long-term?

56 comments

You don't need a subscription for instances to stay around long term - you need to use them. Instances without users shut down, naturally.
Instance owners don't do this to get rich or have someone else pay the bills I believe. They just want users.
And I think many of us hate subscriptions. :)
- I understand, and for the most part, I agree, but I would still like to find a paid instance.
  
  It seems like most instances have a donation link, so you could just donate on a regular basis.
  
  Why if I may ask?
  
  For what purpose? Why not a free one? I mean, if the price is right I'll host you one.
  I've been considering hosting one myself, this would give me a push in that direction.
- Absolutely, I think people are still thinking in the mindset of web 2.0. The fediverse is the internet before capitalism ruined it.

Not sure how tech savvy you are, but hosting your own server costs a few euros per month, you decide how long it stays up and you are chief in command.
- Second this. And other instances would still be accessible. Even more so since lemmy.world (along with probably some others) is starting censorship, which wouldn't affect you, since you decide what you can see.
  
  I'd love to self host one for everyone but not allow communities. The idea would be that I federate with everyone no matter what and leave a what the user wants to sub to up to them. No censorship at all.
  Not having communities would mean I don't have to worry about what I host and have other instances defederate with me. Plus, I have no interest in being mod, dealing with DCMA,user reports, etc.
- Yeah, I may go with this option, but I really like the idea of helping create an economy. I suspect one of the Achilles heels of the Fediverse will be instances disappearing after users based their identity on a free server that the host eventually lost interest. Time will tell. I may be wrong. But also may be right.
- I don’t know about Mastodon. I run my own Lemmy server, single user. I sometimes run a discovery script honger my “all” populated and I’m good to go.

I think https://masto.host/ offers what you want, you can pay to host mastodon. I haven’t seen the same for Lemmy.

https://communick.com are intending to provide those services. (.news is their Lemmy server)
- Good reminder that I still have to create an alt there

elest.io seems to be OSS focused host where you pay per hour and they offer an option to move to any other host.
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
https://elest.io/open-source/mastodon

https://cloudisland.nz/about is a paid Mastodon server.

social.digitalcourage.de and mastodon.green both are Mastodon server with a (paid) membership model.

As I recall, https://me.dm/ is Mastodon instance that were paid as part of Medium subsripction.
- I’ll check it out. All the ones I have looked at so far feel not well thought out yet. I guess that is to be expected at the beginning.
- I wish they also had a Lemmy server. I’ve always liked Medium and have subscribed to them in the past. If they offered a lemmy servers as part of the whole package, that would be a big win for me.

56 comments