this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs -- and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we're moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn't have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.
I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn't sustainable.
would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?
So... it could work. But that's not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has "gold" at $1, but another has it at $0.50?
ooo good point. i knew someone smarter than me would elucidate this. danke.
Maybe you have to buy them from the instance you're using them on?
That starts running into a few issues. It's high friction ("You mean I have to enter card details every time I want to do this on someone from a new instance?") and it has some serious risk of disproportionate impacts.
People are usually more willing to spend some money on community projects such as an instance they like. This could be a financially viable way to fund online platforms like Lemmy.
Donations are not consistent, that's the big trouble. Especially after a big exodus, people may move, and they may donate for a while, but those donations will typically drop off eventually, even if they keep using it.
You're right that people are usually more willing to spend on community projects, and that's largely true - but watching open-source software as long as I have, I know that donations rarely cover things in the long-term, and most of the projects that are funded well enough to have a team behind them are actually funded by corporations. Heck, even getting one person able to run an instance as a full time gig is going to be difficult without it turning corporate.
Yeah, consistency is a problem. Perhaps we should implement some sort of Lemmy Coin solution that would allow people to show their appreciation to quality posts and support the instance at the same time.
Federation frustrates that, as well -- for cross-instance posts, what's the split? 50/50? What if one instance is charging $1 per coin, but another is $0.50 per coin, what price becomes paid? How will you even ensure that the split can occur reliably? Heck, how will you handle trying to do that transfer internationally?
I know I'm probably coming across as a downer, but without answering these questions, we don't have a solution, we just have a patchwork of ideas that people worked on and implemented without every providing anything useful. I want this to succeed, desperately. I'm tired of corporate interests ruining everything -- but we can't succeed at this without figuring out these long-term issues.
Hmm… Those are valid points.
I can’t come up with anything brilliant, so I’ll just give you my mediocre idea instead. Let’s say there’s an “award foundation“ where you can buy “Lemmy gold” and other awards for a fixed piece. When you find a post worthy of the award, the value is spread among everyone involved. One third to your instance, one third to the instance of the recipient of the award and one third to the instance where the conversion was had.
They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps
Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.
Your right. I overlooked the network itself. Thanks for the added perspective 👍