this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2024
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Make sure to actually understand how those "non-profit" websites and services are functioning.
It costs money to power servers and to maintain them. Most of the fediverse instances like to claim they are run on donations and so forth. But... think about how angry people get at the idea of tipping for ANYTHING and then wonder how many of those are throwing significant cash at your favorite lemmy or mastodon instance per month.
Everyone is always shocked when they find out how social media or a "free" vpn or whatever is funded and where there information is going. But hey, I am sure it will be completely different this time.
The guy who runs the instance I’m on sends out a statement every month, detailing how much he’s received in donations, what everything has cost, and how much there is leftover. Accounting for a small buffer to allow for emergencies, he donates the excess to Alzheimer’s research. We’re a Pritchett focus instance, so everyone’s happy with that.
I’ve paid far more to my Masto admin than I ever did to Twitter.
a) it's not significant amounts, it's quite cheap, per user, to run lemmy, e.g. lemm.ee is one of the bigger instances and costs 200 Euro a month, b) tipping 20% on a bill that doesn't even include any service is not the same as donating to a service you like. This is more like a patreon which doesn't lock anything for non-donating users.
storage requirements will only increase (attachments, linked website images), unless you are regularly deleting content and so contributing to link rot
lemm.ee currently even proxies links to external images, sunaurus identified some issues with it, storage wasn't one of them. Storage requirements are going to look quite differently if you're lemmynsfw.com but it's not particularly hard to get enough donations to afford a couple extra TB a month. Much, much cheaper than paying admins an actual wage where I think the actual scaling pain will be.
You can be against the US's tipping culture while at the same time being someone who donates to things lol
But yeah, definitely. For a lot of these things the funding has to be coming from somewhere and there's no way donations are enough.
Generally speaking if you aren't the customer then you are the product. Individual Lemmy and Mastadon instances are getting around this for now because they are small enough that their operational costs can be covered by the ideologically motivated instance admins and users. If Lemmy or Mastadon ever gains wide popularity this will change.
Exactly.