It probably goes against the philosophy or whatever of FOSS or Lemmy itself, but why not be a little evil so that you can actually sustain yourself? Donations can bring us far, but small non-intrusive ads can be a bliss in the skies for the people actually hosting the instance. Especially if there are millions of users uploading thousands of images and videos. This is extremely expensive.
Is running ads really that taboo?
EDIT: some people seem not to get the point of “millions of users”, which presumably includes non-techies that do not use adblockers. I mean that without ads (or mining?), no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example. If you were to want that. And not for profit, but solely for sustainability.
Nothing stops them from doing so.
But I don’t think that’s the path you’ll see super often. Most people enthusiast enough to host their own instance and open it to others probably disagree with ads, and users are very likely going to reject them.
Plus, wether we like it or not, Lemmy is majoritarily used by people with a lot of tech knowledge - the exact same group you’d expect to be running ad blocking software.
But if federated social networks keep growing to the point they could rival a platform like Reddit, for sure some ad supported instances will coexist with user-funded ones.
I’d like the idea of certain instances becoming so large that it attracts the larger populous and becomes one of the major platforms. That is if it remains to be open source and federated.
(Edit: or just a community)
Why is background crypto mining not used? If it’s openly communicated and is an opt-in option, people might prefer that over donation or ads.
I would much rather traditional ads than crypto mining. I don’t want Kbin or Lemmy to become environmentally unfriendly electricity sinks.
I consider stuff like that malware.
Why not just skip the step and instead ask people to join a mining pool instead of what some people to be malicious utilization of their machines.
Crypto mining has a lot of negative conotations, and for good reason. The whole crypto ecosystem is full of scammers and bad actors. And ad supported websites only have incentive to monetize more and more until they are ad infested and can only be used with an ad blocker. That’s the state of a lot of the web today. Plus most big ad networks come with user tracking baked in which is another downside.
I’d rather have a nominal subscription model just to cover costs rather than see an ad anywhere. The cost of hosting per user can’t be much more than a dollar or two per month. Web hosting isn’t all that expensive nowadays.
I’m gone if there is ads even though I’d block them. I’m sick of ads. They have ruined the internet .
If they add a gold like feature that splits between the instance and the project that would be useful in addition to community donations.
I’m here because its not like the rest of the internet. I run tor relays to help the network, I contribute to foss projects and I seed distros too for the greater good. There is enough of us here to keep it going.
I’ve been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it’s time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I’d be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn’t mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.
I think I’d rather have an optional membership to support the instance with perks or something. Not reddit gold though. Lemmy silver?
I’d like this to be avoided as much as possible. But I am a bit weary about the fact that even small instances have to copy everything else on the Fediverse and thus will be very strained. Or do they copy the stuff only when their user wants to view it? Not sure how it works.
The point of the fediverse is that hosts can pick their own business model - free, freemium, ad-supported, subscription. Just like e-mail, you sign up with the provider who provides the type of service you think best meets your needs. If they piss you off, you move to a different provider.
If the fediverse demands hosting for millions of users, someone will make a server to host millions.
I personally think “big” instances should focus on user/identity management, while communities live in small groups on small instances. This lets the identity providers include/exclude with much better granularity (compared to the beehaw mess) making the communities much less susceptible to being collateral damage.
The advertisement model needs to die. No one wants to have their experience corrupted by panels trying to sell you something. We can find other ways to fund the network
Why do we want a single instance to be as large as reddit?
I run my own instance and I don’t run ads because I frankly hate seeing them myself. They clutter up the web view, cause lag on the webpage, and frankly are annoying and ugly to look at.
I’d rather pay out of my own pocket to keep my instance going rather than run ads. Donations would be ideal to help keep it running for longer. As sad as it is, if I couldn’t keep paying the server costs and there weren’t any donations… I’d just shut the server down. I personally will never run ads on an instance I run. I don’t want to perpetuate or support the lifeless corporate greed cycle.
How much money does it even cost running an instance?
If it is just a single person private instance, relatively cheap (like a few USD). As you scale it up though it does quickly get pricey. I think mine is around 20-25ish/mo plus 4/mo for backups. I know some of the bigger instances are closer to 50-100/mo and it’s only going up as their users go up.
If donations work, it maybe a good way to finance it. Does it require loads of work and moderation? Or is it easy
Donations seem to be plan for instances in the fediverse, I’ve heard of some other efforts to monetize instances either through advertising or subscriptions but apparently those instance were quickly defederated with.
There was a bit of technical work to stand up my own instance but developers are working on making setting up an instance easier. I haven’t had to moderate anything on my instance yet as it is <10 users at the moment but it is definitely something you have to keep in mind as your instance grows.
Defederated means isolated more or less? Good luck with your instance!
I use https://1984.hosting (for privacy) to run my instance on a VPS. I’m using 1 core 2GB RAM VPS and that costs 10 dollars a month. So far everything looks to be running pretty well.
There probably are cheaper VPS providers as well, so you likely will be able to go cheaper.
And how many users can that host? With that price there maybe not really a need to actually run ads. What work is involved with running an instance?
Ads? Hard pass.
I’d rather set up my own server and federate.
You should set up your own server no matter what happens. That’s my plan.
sorry, I block all ads by default. if I get popups indicating that I need to whitelist, I block elements until I never see that crap again or the site is unusable, after which I find a different site.
no ads. never
I’d probably be fine with Old-Style Internet Ads: A Div that displays a bit of text or a small image that suggests an interesting product for the user, possibly related to the page content they’re viewing.
But new style internet ads demand things like iframes, numerous scripts, user tracking, user anti-tracking circumvention, and attempts to weasel their way out of the small sidebar they’ve been scripted into. If there was any way for an advertising network to ban/blacklist any advertisers that do things like that, or even offer them a limited model for what they can add to a page, I’d be a little more okay with them.
AO3 is a huge website that makes money purely off of donations. They often get like quadruple the amount they ask for every time they ask for money. Wikipedia comes to mind as well, although I’m not sure if they only make money off of the donations. Instead of donating to a third party service, Lemmy should build in the ability to donate into the website.
Ads on Reddit were one of the reasons that third party apps were so popular… They didn’t show them.
The whole point is to get away from Reddit, not just make several smaller copies. No thanks. I’ve donated already, and I’ll donate again (to Jerboa, Lemmy devs, and instances if they prove their worthiness.
no instance would be able to scale to the point where it can compete with Reddit for example
Well I think that’s part of the point of the Fediverse: No single server has to scale that much. Sure, the big ones are going to get big and stay big, but no one Lemmy server is ever going to have as many people using it as Reddit does. That means the cost of each instance is going to be tiny in comparison to what Reddit spends to keep one big monolithic site running (which is easily in the millions). Fediverse will distribute users across many instances/platforms which also distributes the cost. Not only do users have many Lemmy instances, they’ve also got kbin, and mastodon, plus any other platform that joins ActivityPub.
Reddit/Facebook style monolithic sites are not viable. You see time and time again these platforms desperately trying to monetize because it’s so expensive to run. Fediverse can have millions and millions of users, but no single entity will have to foot that bill.
So many new users completely missing the point of the Fediverse. We want to avoid having one big instance with one person in control. At that point you may as well name them the CEO.
I’d rather have a smaller/cheaper platform with no ads than a bloated mess like reddit with ads and data mining.
A small community is perfectly ok.
