this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
720 points (91.1% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35295 readers
1407 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

I'm fairly new and don't 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?

Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

The Fediverse SHOULD allow monetization and they don't yet. As per Mark Bayliss:

The problem here is that despite these large and escalating costs, a significant part of the fediverse is intrinsically hostile to anything other than charity or goodwill as a basis for running a server, due to hostility to capitalism as an abstract or just on a general point of principle regarding how web services should be funded. Any instance that runs advertisements to its users is likely to be blocked by any others purely on those grounds. Some instances have tried to introduce subscription fees for joining and have been blocked as a result. Ownership by a corporate entity or accepting funding from one is also likely to wind up with a block.

I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not saying to commercialize the entirety of the Fediverse but if you want it to actually compete with Twitter and Reddit and Tumblr then you need to open it up further.

I'm not sure this is what the community wants, or what we should want. The server operators should be able to get enough money to afford operation and cover some of their time investment, but I don't think competing with businesses that obsess over large growth is a worthy goal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I understand what you’re saying but I do fear that we risk relegating Mastodon and Lemmy into niche apps the same way desktop Linux never got popular. As the linked author noted above, most people don’t care about “free as in speech” or whether a site is open source or not, they just want working social media where they can talk to others.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I am, somehow, on both sides. I do think monetization is necessary, but would also like to keep part of it out of it.

I guess that I see monetization a bit idealistically, like having non tracking ads and sponsorships, or having separate instances with paid accounts that is also financing others... stuff like that. But that might not be enough anyway, as it is not for reddit, twitter, fb, yt... even with all of their data harvesting and selling.

So maybe donations are the way to go? Wikipedia is one of the biggest sites of the world and is managing to collect enough money through donations.

Lemmy/Mastadon is even easier, country/cities can have their instances to allow their citizens access to social network, companies can have their instances for their users and potential users or just as giving something to community.

And we can have this kind where we donate to individual administrators.

I think that even if I would enable adds they would get less than 1USD per month for me, let's say I donate 10USD per year for lemmy+mastadon?

Maybe tutanota, protonmail can have their instances? They are already hosting stuff, so would be a big problem (except moderation).

I can see all of this fail, but I also see it can succeed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Totally agree. Really do not want this to become too popular, because then you get bots, fraud, fake news, trolls and shitposting. Being too small to interest those guys is a good thing.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I think you're missing that point.

If you're paying to provide a free server, and along comes another server owner who wants to peer with you. Only they're charging their users for the same thing you're giving away for free. Why wouldn't you be a little bit miffed that they want to take your freely-given service and sell it to their users - because that's what would be happening in that situation.

Monetising something that's intended to be free is very, very difficult. Not impossible (see open source software and the businesses that grow around that), but it's a lot harder when it's a service.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think the best solution to this whole monetization issue is to just make sharing bandwidth as easy as possible on the fediverse.

If hosting can be done by everyone using an instance, no one entity has to bear overwhelming costs, so there's no excuse to demand money.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's an interesting idea - have a special tier on one or more cloud providers paid for out of that source, or even a flat payment to any server provider based on number of users/activity or something like that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't think I would have joined my server if it required a fee to join but now that I'm on it and enjoying the experience and administration I'd gladly throw a buck or two a month their way for servers/maintenance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

cheap subscription is probably overboard for my instance

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Subreddits have 10 million subscribers, I haven’t seen a Lemmy group with more than a few thousand people. I don’t know about you but I’d like Lemmy to be as rich in content and discussion as Reddit was. Unless you like social media when it’s empty of users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Well, then you're free to go back to there. I do happen to prefer fewer more thoughtful users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Were you on reddit 10+ years ago?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I could see a legitimate service being made out of something like an extra private lemmy, or a lemmy with additional features. Sort of like you'll see these suites of services from Proton or Nord. Yeah, i can set up my own SMTP server, even encrypt my data, but it's a lot easier to pay a few bucks to have a reliable service do it.

With federated services eventually becoming mainstream, i wouldn't be surprised to see some companies offering packages that do things like provide additional privacy or larger amounts of storage.

Or like I'd imagine sustainable video hosts will have to monetize somehow just to pay for the storage space.