So who actually owns the server this instance runs on? Doesn’t it just mean they do whatever they want? So confused
There are a ton of Lemmy instances that all communicate with each other and each instance is ran on hardware by different owners. So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
So if one instance goes to shit your account will still work on all the other ones.
My understanding is that (at present anyway) since accounts are not federated, your account on that “gone to shit” instance will be gone. Your content will still be on many federated instances, but not your account. That would be lost.
Yeah, one thing Lemmy needs to solve is account migration. Instead of creating a new account on a new instance you move your existing account from one instance to another. It won’t save the account if the instance is already removed, but it at least gives an option to move if you feel like there’s a better instance for you.
Ah… dope. So it’s currently just running through donations I presume. Another dumb question: If an instance owner goes rogue and just nukes it are your posts gone too or is it archived somewhere?
So if a Lemmy instance goes down, all of the communities and comments go down with it? Seems almost worst than having a CEO?
Seems like the saving grace is anyone can either start or move to a different lemmy instance whenever. It’s not like someone can just host their own copy of Reddit if spez ever went nuclear.
When we think CEO we need to think “shareholders.” Including potential shareholders as in Reddit’s case. I think sometimes we are so focused on our feelings about a “big boss” that we forget the CEO is merely an avatar for the investor point of view in a business. They answer to the board of directors who represent or are even made up of shareholders, and they are usually paid in such a way to motivate shareholder benefits, like with stock instead of a high salary.
And when we think “shareholders” we need to think “loan money.” That’s how you get to be a shareholder. You plunk down some cash to float the business.
Therefore, to really be CEO-proof, an entity needs to be fiscally independent and never need an advance of cash to keep going. It must be entirely bootstrapped, paid-as-you-go, with no one standing to gain a whole bunch or lose a whole bunch by its failure or sale. That’s kind of a lot of needles to thread when you’re building something big. It can be done but we have to know what game we’re actually playing and not get distracted by “fuck The Man” sentiments. This is about cash.
Literally this… what is happening in Reddit is the CEO attending the needs of the shareholder via the board… companies aren’t the “sisters of charity”. They are where they are for profit and at the very least they need to have a cash flow that allow them to pay employees and bills. There are some B Corps out there, but most of the companies are there to make the big buck. In the case of Reddit we users are just a product that they try to keep to make the company profitable selling ads or whatever. If you want a Reddit-kind-of platform user-centric we need to pay for it and become the customers instead the product.
But isn’t reddit still a private company? They don’t have shareholders in that case right? They WANT shareholders which is why they’re pulling this b.s to appear profitable when they go public. I think this is just plain old greed.
To be fair, CEOs are often compensated largely through stock and are therefore incentivized to boost that stock price, at least until they have the opportunity to sell (or use as collateral on a loan with an inflated valuation, I’m not super familiar with the financial trickery played at that level).
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Exactly. Decentralized services and servers that are unified in a common standard is the way the web should always have been.
Someone fucked up and told the advertisers that a dollar could be made so we end up with the ad cancer that is the ‘modern’ web.
One issue that I don’t think Lemmy has tackled collectively is the licensing of the user data. Lemmy is open source and that’s one crucial part of the enshittification resistance equation. The other is doing the equivalent for the user data. If the user data is licensed under the right version of the CC license, it will ensure that it can always be copied to another instance in cases of instance enshittification. As far as I know, there isn’t anything about who owns the user data. That defaults to every author having copyright over their data. While this means the instance owner can’t sell it without permission from every user it’s also not conductive to moving bulk data across instances. Individual migration would improve this significantly but I believe we should switch to having user data licensed under some CC license too.
If all of this sounds strange, think Wikipedia. That’s what guarantees data contributed to Wikipedia stays within our hands irrespective of what the Wikimedia Foundation does.
This is a great point. The user data needs to be enshrined in such a way that it can be easily moved in a bulk migration without requiring a direct opt-in from every user. While at the same time making it clear how it’s being used/kept/sold/not sold/etc.
I’m not against LLMs using the data generated on sites like this to inform useful answers when I ask ChatGPT a question. It genuinely makes AI a better tool, but I feel like the contributors of such content should know how their answers are being used.
LLMs are likely going to scrape no matter the license. I doubt OpenAI got a copyright license from Reddit to ingest it. In fact I’m not even sure they need one if ingestion can be make similar enough to “reading the web site”. And so making content CC probably won’t affect LLM use of public posts.
CEO proof is a good reason to describe why I want my podcasts to come via an RSS feed instead of depending on an all-in-one app. I’ve often said things about open gardens and interoperable services, but that preaches to the choir.
“CEO Proof” really sells it to a non technical user.
This is what I like about Lemmy and the fediverse; Its not like some rich company or person could really take over Lemmy and then pull a twitter or a reddit. The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances and then creating terrible policies and/or mine all of the data collected in the Lemmy instance, but with Lemmy you could just move to another instance.
Right now I feel like were in the same position when Linux started out - really cool in concept but with no clear way to monetize which causes doubts for its future. It wasn’t until RedHat really popularized the support for enterprises model that Linux really solidified its future; they found a way to monetize open source projects. Lemmy itself is very young and will need to have its RedHat moment, otherwise its doomed to fail – donations are nice but are never enough.
As a side note to this - I find it funny that companies are super eager to replace people at the bottom with AI when in my mind it would be easier to replace a CEO with AI to ingest company data and make cost-cutting decisions, or to be able to look at the market and determine what a company should be doing in order to compete. CEO positions are the most expensive for a company so eliminating it with a machine would save investors TONS of money. It would never need meetings, just take in input of whats going on in the company and externally in its competing market.
I disagree. The Free Software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system weren’t created for profit, but for user freedom. There is nothing wrong with making money in an ethical way (unlike what Reddit does), but that is not necessary for projects to survive and there are plenty of examples of this. Debian for example is a fully free operating system and it’s maintained entirely by volunteers for free.
The Free Software Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, Blender Foundation. They are all non-profits.
We’ll need someone to input that data, I guess we’ll need to create a new position for that.
I shall be the CAIIO (chief AI input officer) and may salary will only be $150m.
Hey that’s a lot of work for one dude. I’ll be your associate. I shall be the ACAIIO and my salary is twice as much as yours because of the longer title
Guys, we can all share. I’m sure we can create plenty of management and HR positions for everyone ;)
The only way I could see things going south is if corporations start buying popular instances
It’s not quite the same, but Meta/Instagram is working on a Twitter competitor that will use ActivityPub and therefore is essentially one huge Fediverse instance that they’re launching.
I didn’t know their version would use ActivityPub, that’s very interesting.
I don’t think it’s necessary “CEO proof” but it is definitely a bit better positioned to avoid the pitfalls that Twitter and Reddit have experienced. Hence the reason I am here. But there’s nothing stopping a for-profit corporation from buying out the owner of a large instance (or multiple large instances). I think the best way to try and prevent that is for people to join hyper-local, hyper-specific instances that can all connect with one another. I assume that would be the benefit of Lemmon.
You can see a good example of this in the gaming sphere as both Path of Exile and Warframe have entire instances for themselves.
One thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
Edit: sorry if you saw this comment two or three times, posting can still be a bit buggy…
I’m thinking about creating my own personal instance hosted on maybe a RasPi or something, just for myself. It would cost very little (RasPi and Domain name are already laying around unused…).
It might not be the fastest, and if my internet is down then the instance won’t be available (but then again I’d be the only one using it anyway).
But I’m still trying to figure out other pros/cons with that approach.
I think people really overestimate how much stuff like this costs relative to how much users are willing to spend. My 1.5k user Mastodon instance costs roughly $100/mo for managed hosting. I set up a donation portal on OpenCollective and got fiscally hosted by the Open Collective Foundation (giving us 501©(3) status).
Overnight we got one-time donations covering more than six to eight months of our hosting costs. Our monthly donations are double our hosting costs. And we’ve gotten donations from private charity funds and are eligible for grants. This is all from less than 1% of our user base paying us just a little bit, usually <$10.
Lemmy is infinitely more efficient to host than Mastodon, and I’m sure some Elixir-based alternative will come along and make it cheaper to host too. The fact that Patreon is as successful as it is right now and that creators can make a living off of it shows that this model is self-sustaining and that you don’t need advertisements or to profit.
I fully support that idea. Nothing comes free and as a lemmy.world user I’m using lemmy.world resources to browse lemmy.ml pr whatever. It’s only fair that I fund this server to do it’s work in some way.
As long as we aren’t charged for getting the content itself.
I will tell this nonstop, online advertisement (as a form of monetization) is pretty damn dated nowadays. You could give them literally a dollar every year and they would make more from you than serving you ads.
Unpopular opinion: I kinda feel like a reason ads are so popular nowadays is because it gives the user a way of feeling they are supporting a product/creator by doing pretty much nothing.
I think pitching in a dollar every year is preferable. Heck, I even pay much more to Youtube to get rid of advertisements. But it does pose a significant threshold for new users.
A hybrid model doesn’t sound too bad to me, where you can pay for an ad free server.
They are popular, because it’s a way to squeeze out extra money out of the users (often in addition to paying for the product) and since the software is proprietary the users often can’t do anything about it.
Btw notice how most youtubers turned into salesmen that want to sell you something in each video and their sponsored segments are often minutes long.
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Thanks, I have another question: what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won’t have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it’s overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it’s relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don’t think that’s too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that’s less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
Yeah and here is how lemmy.world’s owner funds his Lemmy and Mastodon instances:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
He said lemmy.world could handle 1 million users and mastodon.world at some point had over 100k active users.
I don’t understand why people think it’s necessary. Does Firefox display ads? Blender? GNU/Linux operating system? VLC video player?
No offense, but I think maybe you are so used to corporations trying to drain your money that you don’t notice how much amazing software we are using that was built for free. And this software is often better than the commercial competition (for example it took Microsoft 10-15 years to add workspaces to Windows and tabs to file explorer after they were added in GNU/Linux and it took them over 20 years to add a package manager).
Not only was that software made for free, but it also gives users freedom unlike (usually) the commercial alternatives.
Something that makes forums a bit different is that it costs the owners when people use the website. Unlike Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc… A server host can’t just make the forum available, then set and forget it, they either have to pay a huge fee to some host like AWS, or have a huge stockpile of computers in their basement.
How do you think Blender, Firefox, Linux, etc, are distributed? Probably get more requests per day than any single Lemmy instance does.
Back in 2008 I met a bunch of the VLC devs at a KDE related open source software conference. They talked about their experiences getting approached by companies with “fuck you” levels of money with offers they couldn’t refuse – and yet refused. In 2008 it was about bundling spyware with installers, largely. I always admired their stalwart refusal to bend.
Side note: this was shortly after they’d completed their transition to Qt as their toolkit. They stole their little volume control widget from KDE’s media player, Amarok. The beauty of open-source and cross pollenation. I expect Lemmy and kbin and others in the fediverse will freely cross pollenate too. In the end, open source wins.
The difference is you cited software projects, not hosted infrastructure. A person can contribute to a FOSS dev project and not incur expenses dependent on end-users activity. Hosting a fediverse application isn’t like that, somebody has to pay for the hosting and the hosting expenses will scale with user activity.
The projects I mentioned weren’t made for profit, but they are now so important that they are funded from donations. Both from users and corporate sponsors. With that money they are able to hire full-time developers. So they still cost our society money, but no ads or spyware is required. I think hosting could work the same way.
I’ve never thought of something being CEO-proof, but you’re not wrong. Those CEO’s did shit the bed in the most diarrhea way possible.
My only concern is extremists making use of it to organize, spread misinformation, coordinate attacks, etc. and there’s zero oversight. That’s a serious concern that needs addressing, but I have no idea how.
Ban those communities from your instance. There’s not going to ever be any way to prevent them starting their own, all you can do is defederate. There doesn’t need to be any more.
I mean, if it’s real bad shit like violence, that’s where FBI comes in, right?
Not sure if the ACLU would be able to do anything about hate speech.
But bad actors would have to run a shell game of go between instances to recruit. And they’ve been doing that shit for decades anyways. Hell, it’s the same thing as under 18 punk shows back in the day when nazis hung in the parking lot trying to give booze/drugs to kids.
Like, imagine if someone said we can’t have phones because assholes can also buy a phone…
Yeah, same thing that happened when gab started a Mastodon instance, everyone immediately defederated from them for being Nazis and their reach stayed confined to only their own platform. Deplatforming is never completely stripping a platform from a person/group, it’s more of a quarantine. Keep them isolated from the wider community so they can’t recruit new members, and their groups wither
Would a “community notes” feature like Twitter be useful or even work in this context?
To be fair, it’s not like those were under control on Reddit either.
There will never be a time when you need adds to pay for a server even if you had a server with 50 million people the cost to run that server might be like 100k if just 1 million people pay 1 dollar you already have 1 million dollars a month you only need adds when your a company that needs to grow every quarter
I agree that the more accurate term is “board-proof” but I still think “CEO-proof” conveys the idea better to someone who is unaware of the way social media corpos work. The image of the shady CEO with his pinstripe suite and greased hair, lighting his big cigar with a wad of dollar bills is so strong in the cultural conciousness, that even my inlaws would switch to a federated plattform.
In the Fediverse there are no Zuckerbergs, Musks, Dorseys, Huffmans etc.
There is ALWAYS the possibility to enshittify anything. Meta is trying to infiltrate Mastodon already.
Unspezzable.
“Welcome, I’m the CEO of email!”
Really, it should be kept more like an overplatform or protocol like what the email is. Luckily, Lemmy has the roles of developers and content admins so separated and decentralized that it shouldn’t become a corpo-danger from now on
