I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.
The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?
This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.
TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?
I don’t see why the Fediverse can’t be run as non-profit and by volunteers. We are 8 billion people on this planet. I’m sure we can handle it.
I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don’t look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
But do you remember how they monetized email
Yeah, the largest email company is probably Google (maybe Microsoft). Google definitely looks at every email they receive for users!
I don’t use Gmail. There are plenty of email providers out there that is completely free without ads and privacy focused. Mailfence, Tutanota, ProtonMail etc. Personally I use my ISP provider that is actually pro privacy - Bahnhof . That due it is a niche and if you don’t save logs you don’t have the log storage cost.
If feddit.nu (only 50 users) did not exist I would have chosen to self-host it on the free Oracle VPS teir.
The claim was “Email server owners don’t look at the content”. This is untrue since possibly the largest owner of email servers looks at the content to monetize the service. That’s all.
They are not suppose to do that. It is disrespect to the user privacy. Hence good opportunity to change owner. Just a design flaw of the protocol that makes it possible to abuse that. Gmail is just one single provider, but yes, many more does it and Gmail is big.
Monetizing is what ruins other places.
I like the way my home instance does financial backing through an open model, and that’s part of why I chose it.
An ideal is enough contributors to keep the lights on and to reimburse the admins for their time spent in keeping it afloat. Moderation should always be a volunteer position for those that want to support their individual communities.
Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs (to a point), feature development and then charitable donations in that order. Non-profit on paper and in practice.
This is viable for a small instance. Maybe even larger ones if the users are altruistic enough as a whole.
That’s pretty cool, I didn’t know that about lemmy.zip
First question, why would we want monetization? people do amateur theatre, short movies for fun, volunteer do coach kids sport for fun so the whole society doesn’t have to be commercial, and even Wikipedia is mostly ran by volunteers.
I mean sure, federated instance and some authors may get government grant for culture (which would be better spend than for commercial movies, or all the government money spent in AI) but not monetizing won’t prevent people from contributing
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.
Unsubstantiated claim: Any set of rules that aim at distributing money according to some merit can be exploited in a way that those who get the most money are not those providing the most value.
Or less formally: Any game can be cheesed.
Instances could run stake pools and tie the two together somehow. Perhaps in this case, your username follows whatever pool you’re staking to.
It’s a solution look for a problem admittedly. It works better in the case that instances act as retail “clubs” like Costco for example. In that case, stakers to said pool could be authorized to get certain deals on products sold by that instance.
First sign of crypto and I am out. I would speculate that is true of a lot of people in the Fediverse.
From my perspective, there are only two use cases for crypto 1. Criminal activity 2. Pump and dumps
Yeah! How dare people try to have wealth that is actually borderless and self-sovereign. Those idiots are scammers! I will own nothing and be happy. Get out of my way, I need to step in line to bow before the Federal reserve (an organization that I fully admit is corrupt to the core and the very root of the issues in our society). I’m actually a Marxist living in a capitalist society. So, I am too cool to worry about the fact that I actually need money. I’ll just pretend that I don’t need it even though I REALLY do. I’ll do whatever I can to piss on viable alternatives to the Fed just because people were degenerate gamblers and got owned by obvious scammers. Sure the fed can take away my money for no reason, inflate the dollar so that my savings are worth less every single day, and do whatever they feel like with my money but that is a good thing because scammers exist in the world…
sarcasm
/s
Nice rant. A very provincial take I must I add.
Thanks. 😂 Honestly, I hate scammers. I really do. But they’re SO easy to spot.
I feel that the hivemind threw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to crypto. Thanks to Do Kwan, Sam Bankman Fried, etc, a whole viable set of technologies aimed at wrestling power from the world bank has been vilified by the hivemind.
Nono, it is not all just a scam. It is just {insert list of pretty much all relevant actors} that are scammers, the idea itself is totally legit! /s
Futher reading: https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-disaster.html
You are an easy target if you think the scammers are easy to spot 😅
Scammers:
- don’t tend to share any of their their source code
- usually have an initial token allocation where insiders are given early access to more than 15% of tokens. (this one is a CRUCIAL)…Obviously, the best ITA is one where the tokens are 100% available to everyone at once.
- heavily market their cryptocurrency before it even has a use-case (most projects fall into this category)
- their governance is centralized to some charismatic Elon-bro that talks about price all the time
- don’t let you use any wallet you want (self-sovereignty is CRUCIAL)
- don’t give you access to your keys at all times (again, self-sovereignty)
- are usually just some governance token or ERC-20 or some quickly minted Solana token ($LIBRA $TRUMP $MELANIA were all obvious scams)
- never have a viable peer-reviewed white paper
- their code is NEVER formally verified by neutral parties
- use technologies that are not auditable
- use technologies that are not decentralized
I’ve spotted many scammers a mile away just starting with this list off the top of my head.
For instance, I am the moderator of infosec.pub/c/midnight and actually locked my own communities until I see the source code.
I like the tech from what they tell me. But, I can’t, in good conscience recommend it yet because it ticks some of the above scammer boxes.
Yet you fail to see the forest for the trees…
A system that makes it so trivial to scam people, is a system made for (and likely by) scammers, even if it has other good ideas as well.
I don’t know if you know this, but in many places obsession over central banks is simply not a thing. Maybe you need some real problems in your life? It would help you gain perspective.
And btw, the World Bank isn’t actually a world bank in the literal sense of the word.
I don’t have time to educate you but:
- civil asset forfeiture is a thing
- runaway inflation (and deflation of currencies) due to excessive money printing is a thing
- the work bank may not officially be a bank but what it is is a giant conglomerate of corporations that owns nations, takes part in coups, assasination, price fixing, and controls the dollar.
Did you really think I haven’t heard of this copytext? It’s pretty standard spam, no?
This is not a real thing, it’s more about acting out and tantrums. You don’t care or understand about the issues you describe.
With the right oligarch propaganda, you can be trained to claim that spicy mayonnaise is limiting freedumz and shiiiit!!!
Crazy idea here: would it be possible to have a model where everyone’s phone is a mini personal instance, syncing with others when the user opens the app? When a phone is offline that phones content would be unavailable too, but that is part of the truly decentralised model.
That would drain your battery pretty quickly since it would need to be communicating with other instances constantly
Would love to see an optional monthly subscription to Lemmy where funds are automatically distributed based on how you used Lemmy that month. There would have to be a lot of research on how to avoid exploitation, but Open Collective might have some good examples of how to securely handle funds like that
I would love this, great idea
Something along the lines of a monthly donation model, perhaps with a nominal “pro” system. A badge to showing that you donate and how many years you’ve been donating (users can disable display of such badges if they want).
I second something like this, don’t make it compulsory but instead something people want to spend money to support.
Great idea. Backed by some kind of Patreon for FOSS. Which might exist already, as I just learned here: Open Collective
I think keep it donation based. Perhaps do a Lemmy gold where u can donate to boost a comment/post and said donation is split between content creator community instance etc.
Truly fair would be to have corporations pay.the users to allow them to show them advertisements.
A corporation will only pay users to watch ads if it is a way to get them to buy junk that they didn’t need or possibly even want. Otherwise the model breaks. Advertising is a scourge, to rely on it in any way does not feel “values-driven” to me.
PS: to be clear, maybe the ad model has merits on pragmatic grounds but, speaking personally, if I ever see an ad here, I am GONE and never coming back.
I agree it feels off, but it’s better than what we have now. Users could allow certain companies’ ads they feel comfortable viewing.
The additional benefit for companies would be that they would have a direct finger on the pulse of the market. If they make a decision and they see a lot of users abandon their ads, it was probably a bad decision.
The obvious downside is that people that can use the money will be under the influence of big corporations more.
I mean honestly, why not? If a server admin chargers a $1 per ad the user should get $0.50. Crude example but you get the idea.
I’ve been wondering if there’s an opportunity for instance admins (e.g. lemmy.world) to offer managed instances for user domains.
It would be great if it was easier for the average person to own a domain and use it for email, matrix, Lemmy, etc.
You mean a bit like WordPress.com model?
Possibly, but I’m not very familiar with wordpress.
I imagined something like:
https://nextcloud.com/partners/
The idea is that I could pay someone to admin the same services that they provide to the public.
So like maybe lemmy.world and the other popular instances could offer a Lemmy instance, and maybe also offer: matrix, pixelfed, mastodon, etc etc.
There are decent options out there for mainstream services like email, web, etc. but maybe not for more niche services like lemmy.
Realistically no
Look at what nostr community is doing with zaps, I think it’s cool
isn’t nostr overrun with cryptobros?
Cryptobros aren’t really present on there, at least I never encounter such people. But it’s mainly a “Bitcoiner Bubble” and that’s why I have some issue with staying on there regularly, I don’t like mind-bubbles. However there is some amazing experimentation on there with Value4Value or tipping sats (fractions of bitcoins) instead of liking, local-side open source algorithmes that you can choose and change and the thing I’m most excited about is Ditto which is a community server that act as a Nostr relay AND an ActivityPub instance.
I think Nostr is superior to ActivityPub because you don’t need accounts, it’s authentification is based on asymetrical cryptographic keys which enable digital identities without a central server. However I use the Fediverse more because it is more mature, less mind-bubble and fucking better than commercial, centralized plateforms with opaque algorithmes that you have no control over.
Lot of terrible ideas here, if any of them are implemented lemmy loses a lot if value, donation model works, if a server cant survive itll shutdown and well end up in a better situation since the whole point was to not have centralized servers. Mfs talking about adding ads when this platform barely provides value lol. Like are you serious, at least most platforms with ads developed their own platform and arent just launching someone elses work on a server
If you want lemmy instances to be better off reduce the load, make your own or join a less popular one, joining a bigger one isn’t a good thing (im a hypocrite, im on lemmee)
Still learning about the fediverse, but… What about a simple percentage system so you can donate whatever you want. A large portion goes to the instance that you register with and smaller portions go to Lemmy programmers. Maybe portions can be set aside for parts of the fediverse that we all use like gif/video hosting. I’d say make the percentages the same across the fediverse so people know what goes where.
Personally I’d prefer monthly giving like patreon.
