Well, lemmy isn't reddit, if one instance is down/closed then there's a thousand other ones where you can go. So there's no one big server that be overloaded from api calls - more like a million of them sharing the load.
As far as funding goes, each instance would decide on there own, but in the end most of them would settle for a patreon page or something similar.
I just look to the microblogging side of the network (which has about 10 million total users) as a case study.
The ideal situation? More nodes are added to the network to spread the load and control away from a few very large and very expensive instances. The realistic situation? Some instances manage to secure external funding (such as mastodon.social) and grow extremely large at the expense of smaller instances that shut down from a lack of users and funding. Decentralized protocols like the fediverse and email are not immune to centralization thanks to lazy users who join the biggest instance. My pessimistic outlook is that the Fediverse will eventually become like email, with a few very big instances and a lot of spam making it difficult for smaller instances to enter the network. Enjoy the fresh new internet feeling while it lasts and move on when the platform starts to decay.
I've been happy with lemmy.world and Ruud's management, so I started contributing $2 a month to his patreon. I never paid a cent to reddit, but I want this place to succeed.
I think a Wikipedia donation system could work. Just takes a percentage of the core users to contribute.
Edit: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld or https://patreon.com/mastodonworld
Which one is better to donate through? Patreon or OpenCollective?
I was chatting with someone about this earlier today. It would be great if there was a fan-out system something like icecast crossed with bittorrent, so people could contribute VPS or home internet to propagate Lemmy traffic. That would require some crypto signatures in the protocol to make sure the messages weren't tampered with, of course.
Maybe a little off topic but the briar project recently released thier briar mailbox feature that allows what looks like something of a briar server that is deployed via android app. You connect to it via qr code and keep it always powered and connected to the internet. With so many people having android phones that they aren't using anymore I think it would be awesome to continue this and allow people to deploy thier own instances via second android device / android server app.
It would be nice if developers would stand up their own instances for the apps to default to. They will be in the best position to collect funds directly from users in a way they are used to.
Developer here. I've been looking at the API calls made by the app, and I'll try to give a good example of what is going on:
To be honest, you're probably not going to see a drastic change in API calls right now. The only things that you are calling the API for are:
This is about the same use that you're going to see in the actual web version.
While there may be upsides and downsides to how they are doing it right now, you can get pretty much all of the info you need through one API call. For example, if I get a post, the response will include most of the user info, most of the community info, and obviously all of the post info, plus more. I don't need to make separate calls to retrieve all of that data.
Same goes for user info. In just one call, I can retrieve all of the information as far as subscriptions, moderated communities, user settings, and more without having to make a separate call for each one.
The issue is going to be mainly just the influx of traffic in general, not the apps themselves from what I can tell.
I'm also including the app's name in the user agent so that if something were to ever become a problem, anyone can reach out and discuss what they are seeing so that it can be corrected.
I think donations are sufficient.
Lemmy doesn't seem to be too hard to run. Current popular instances run on HW that costs well under 100EUR monthly which well within reason for crowd-funding.
I see you're getting downvoted, and I do have to agree that it's a pretty optimistic take. With traffic even a tenth what reddit gets, the costs would be significant.
Now it's true that eg. Wikipedia can handle massive server load on a donation model, but I think the utility from Wikipedia is more obvious and more amenable to attracting donations. I think it's a good idea to think about palatable monetization options early on, so we can avoid ending up in a situation where the experience has to suddenly get degraded by intrusive ads or whatever.
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