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How can we fund Lemmy instances?

TLDR - Why don’t Lemmy instances use methods like affiliate links to increase their funding?

I’m a relatively new Lemmy user (I created my account today.) and I noticed that some Lemmy instances are slower than others and that video and GIFs aren’t supported. To fix this, Lemmy instances would require more funding. I know that Lemmings don’t want instances placing ads in their feeds, but couldn’t they find other ways to receive extra funding? For example, the Pi-hole project has affiliate links on their site and they earn a bit of money every time you buy something through a link. Why can’t Lemmy instances do the same? Edit: I don’t mean ads and I hope they don’t follow us here. I mean on the funding page for an instance, they’d have affiliate links to things like Amazon so that they could get more funding. Not as a post either, like Pi-hole’s method.

Today ,

I definitely don’t want ads, but I would not be opposed to a sticky on lemmy.world (or somewhere that would be seen by most people) that requests a donation - a little reminder with a link that’s easy enough to skip if you don’t want to.

Today ,

This is probably a stupid question, but when r/ content shows up on Google, how does that happen and is there money involved? I feel like there’s always money involved.

MothBookkeeper ,

Donations, maybe merch. That’s it. I don’t want the actual content of Lemmy to start being influenced by money. If the server is slow because of it, I’ll donate or just deal with it.

MothBookkeeper , (edited )

No.

TurnItOff_OnAgain , (edited )

Fun fact, you can link an external image and have it show up in your comment as the actual image like this

![image alt text](https://image url)

The format is the same as adding a url, the key is to put the exclamation point at the beginning of the format.

the more you know gif

MothBookkeeper ,

Hey, it worked! Thanks!

Whirlybird ,

Honestly I’d be fine with most instance owners putting in a “show ads to support running costs” option in our profile settings. I’d turn it on to support them because seeing an ad here and there doesn’t bother me.

GutterPunch ,

For self-hosted hobby instances, expenses are likely all out of pocket. Instances amassing a large amount of users could potentially be driven to aggressive financially-driven changes of how their instance works, to maximize exposure to ad posts or sponsored pinned posts, for example. Donation-centric contribution helps alleviate that kind of seeping financial platform degradation.

treadful ,
@treadful@lemmy.zip avatar

I’d rather donate than be marketed to.

lime_glowworm OP ,

I would rather donate too, but is it marketing if you list affiliate links on your donation page?

BrerChicken ,

Dude no stop

chulagirl ,

I kick down a couple bucks a month to my Mastodon server operator via Patreon, and figured I’d do a similar contribution here at some point. Not everyone is into donating but hopefully enough users would be willing to help keep their instance healthy if asked. I’m pretty new here but I easily found the donation options for my Lemmy instance.

McMillan ,
@McMillan@lemmy.fmhy.ml avatar

Patreon and a non-profit funding organization NPR-style is the way to go I think. I haven’t done any non-profit stuff so far but would love to set that up for an instance!

Mountaineer ,
@Mountaineer@lemmy.world avatar

Individual instance owners can do literally whatever they like.
Put up ads.
Charge a subscription.
Anything.

Let’s say instance A is hosting a community that everyone on instances B and C love to participate in.
But A want’s to earn some money so they start charging access to their local users.
This doesn’t effect users of B and C at all, because the data is federated.
The owner of A get’s grumpy and defederates B and C.
The users on B and C find somewhere else, either on one of their instances, or on D.

Everybody wins.

Emperor ,
@Emperor@feddit.uk avatar

I have suggested this on my home instance. It’s nice to claw some money back from folks we link to and it should scale better than just donations.

I do think it might require a bit to update any links with an affiliate code to properly work but it seems doable.

At the moment, most instances can get by on donations from a core, enthusiastic set of users but, as numbers grow, I suspect the percentage donating will drop. Necessitating other the exploration of other avenues of funding.

Nollij ,

Currently, the biggest challenge will be storage. Any images or videos uploaded directly to Lemmy (as opposed to linking a 3rd-party site) takes up space on every instance that federates that post. For large instances, this can get overwhelming.

Aside from that, the server specs to host Lemmy, even a large/popular instance, are remarkably low. It can easily be covered by just a handful of users, and not even particularly generous users.

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