I feel bad for the lemmy.world admins that have to keep up with the software needed and costs accrued to handle the world knocking on their doorstep. I hope advertisers hit them up soon so their bills become easier to pay. While advertising was annoying on reddit, Iām more than willing to put up with it on this instance of lemmy, the admins have earned it.
I think this is an unpopular stance here. Iām not certain how else admins keep things running, but my limited time on Lemmy suggests people are hostile to ad-influence on how things run.
Iām beginning to feel this way too. We need to distribute the load, especially at this early stage.
What is also missing from the big picture is a dedicated āAboutā link in the navbar of Lemmy instances, providing users with a statement of detailed information on the people/organizations behind a given instance, its location in the world, its hardware, etc. A byline in the front page sidebar isnāt enough.
I hate to be the one to say this, but yeah, thereās a big reason why they shouldnāt be pushed to another server, at least not right now at this switchover from Reddit point in time.
Most normal everyday people donāt even know what federation is, and tend to not like it when they find out, as it causes extra work on their part.
They just want a central location where everyone is socializing together, and donāt care at all about the fediverse, except as maybe an escape hatch if some c-suite type goes evil.
Thereās already a hurdle people jump over on change in general, so we should minimize the effort of that change and coming over to Lemmy from Reddit.
Ruud also runs Mastodon.world which has 160k+ users and manages to survive on donations alone. Not sure where the cutoff point is for when that is no longer viable, if there is one. Mastodon.social is huge and takes sponsorships and also gets some grant money I believe. They donāt run ads per se though and claim all sponsors accept contracts stating Mastodon is not going to be run in a way that is influenced by sponsors.
Unfortunately, the reality is that it may become necessary.
Donations can be a saving grace if enough people donate regularly. But such is dependent on peopleās willingness, their own financial stability, and how stressed servers are (how much itāll cost to upgrade and/or maintain infrastructure.)
Itās great if itās viable. Means thereās less outside influence. But thatās if.
As far as Iām aware, Wikipedia has been able to maintain it purely off donations. But Iām not sure if Lemmy could.
Maybe? One thing Lemmy does have going for it is that the majority of users seem to be aware howā¦ Fragile? the fediverses can be. Thereās arguably more passion behind the users and maybe willing to throw support out.
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now itās enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Or maybe nonprofit organizations. Though Iām having a harder time imagining why theyād need a social network site, especially if itās federated with our shit posting āsublemmiesā or whatever weāre calling them here.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. Itās absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.
But only if theyāre able to survive and thrive. Money is a very tricky thing.
As for my example, I was talking more about something like Red Cross (random example) wanting their own Lemmy insurance. Why they would want that. I was really just jesting about the shit posting
Wikipedia is able to pull that off because wikipedia is a digital encyclopedia, not a social forum to add comments to or respond at a massive scale like lemmy is or reddit was. A majority of services either get their revenue from ads, or they start off not doing that but eventually have to cave in and let ads in.
I think ads can be annoying sometimes, but if theyāre done in a similar way reddit did them before their downfall, then it would be tolerable and at least give the lemmy.world admins enough money to cover server running costs
I wouldnāt sweat so much picking a close server as long as it has enough users to be around for a while, reasonable rules, and isnāt under too much strain. Just by getting off the big servers, youāll have a much faster experience and access to the same content.
I moved from lemmy.world to this one that specializes in my interests, and itās running great.
Good tips! I should have explained a bit more, but by getting a server as close as possible, your ping should theoretically be lower than an instance thatās far from you (I know, the internet is not a straight line to the server).
The best way to test this is by pinging the server in a CMD prompt/terminal.
Indeed. If I remember correctly VLemmy is in Ireland, and yet Iāve gotten consistently fast responses from it except during server upgrades. I think the size of the instance really does matter here.
Memes like this always make we wonder the original version of it. I am dying to know the original context of why the father doesnāt want the boyfriend to pull out
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