If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

  •  nutomic   ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) 
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    15211 months ago

    Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.

    Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.

    •  Xune531   ( @Xune531@lemmy.ml ) 
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      1211 months ago

      Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.

    •  communick   ( @communick@communick.news ) 
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      11 months ago

      28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.

        • Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.

          •  Dessalines   ( @dessalines@lemmy.ml ) 
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            2011 months ago

            I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.

            I realized I’d much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called “the magic of thinking big”, and one of its points was to ask the question: “What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?”

            We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.

            • I wasn’t worried about nutomic and you. We all appreciate what you guys are doing for us ex Redditors seeking a new platform, even more so that you are willing to sacrifice so much personal comfort just to bring joy and entertainment–two luxury goods–to all of us. Most people seeking a job are not in it for ideals though, so it’s not completely unreasonable to think that you might need to compete for your work force by offering salaries comparable to what’s common in your market.

              •  phil_m   ( @phil_m@lemmy.ml ) 
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                511 months ago

                I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.

                And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.

            •  Viktorian   ( @Viktorian@beehaw.org ) 
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              11 months ago

              I don’t know about France. I live in one of your neighbouring countries and as a graduate or even undergrad software dev you won’t have a hard time finding a job that pays 60k+. 80k+ is rare but definitely also exists.

              Edit: And yea all of these are pre tax obviously. The cost of living is also quite high though. For example in some places over here rent for even a small flat is 1k or more.

              •  Edo78   ( @Edo78@feddit.it ) 
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                11 months ago

                I live in Italy and here a 50k€ job is considered on the very high end for a senior developer. It means around 2500€/month (for 14 months) net and keep in mind that the medium job in Italy is just a bit less than 34k

              • oh okay, places i thought about it’s like 700e for a 3 rooms flat. And of course in France you have healthcare and stuff, but most likely the same in most of Europe

                With the cost of living in country in east i think they could find skilled passionated devs, and pay them a fair price, which french companies already do (without the fair price)

        • The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

          I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

          •  nutomic   ( @nutomic@lemmy.ml ) 
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            1911 months ago

            These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it’s definitely enough to live. And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

            Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

            • And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

              How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to “work for the portfolio”?

              No one is talking about “a lot of money” here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a “co-op” all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.

              I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

              Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don’t get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.

            • Even if you do not want to call your project a business, “we want enough to survive and pay rent” is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.

          •  Matt   ( @matt@lemmy.world ) 
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            611 months ago

            It’s per month, not per year, so per year they’re receiving €336K, which seems more than enough to me unless people are demanding 6 figure salaries which are not really necessary.

            •  denton   ( @denton@lemm.ee ) 
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              211 months ago

              Hmm ok, I’m not that aware of how much tax and what general cost of living is in the countries the 7 people are living in, so I guess €4000 (before tax)/month could be enough…

              •  Matt   ( @matt@lemmy.world ) 
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                11 months ago

                It depends entirely where people live, even inside countries can differ drastically - as an example, I currently live on around £23,000 a year before tax (about €29,000) while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount. This is in the north of England, but if you were to go further south, you would need a bit more most likely.

                The discourse on the internet is that you seemingly need some crazy amount of money, but the average wages of places are nowhere near the figures people give, and most people are living alright, even if it’s not particularly extravagant.

                This isn’t to say people should be living on scraps or anything, we’re all underpaid at the end of the day, but the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” you see on many (US-centric) places on the internet is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.

                • while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount.

                  Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?

                  we’re all underpaid at the end of the day.

                  Sorry, it seems you are projecting here. Even if that were true, going with this “we are all underpaid, so others should accept that as a fact of life” doesn’t really ring like a compelling point to attract people to work on Lemmy.

                  the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” (…) is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.

                  The point is not whether people could (or should) live on a salary of X or Y. The point no one should be pricing their work in terms of what they “need to get by” and instead they should be pricing themselves in terms of “how much value does my work produce”. When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.

                •  denton   ( @denton@lemm.ee ) 
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                  11 months ago

                  Yeah hence why I said idk the cost of living and €4k might be enough. I also live in the north of England, on (28k but just went up to) 34k before tax but since I live in the city center of a big city, it’s not a huge amount… and I have a housemate

                  Edit and we’re not talking close to 6 figs here, another user pointed out that €4k/month before tax is not even €50k a year so if they’re living in a city that costs more than the relatively-lower cost north of England, they’re not in good shape.

  • When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

    If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

    Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.

  •  poVoq   ( @poVoq@slrpnk.net ) 
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    651 year ago

    People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn’t, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.

    The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don’t have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.

    • That’s definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It’s basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it’s associated with goes down with it.

      It’s a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.

      • I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?

        •  wagesof   ( @wagesof@links.wageoffsite.com ) 
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          11 months ago

          I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on !games@lemmy.ml it can merge with !games@behaw.meh and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.

          Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.

        • When you say “go down” do you mean what happens if an instance shuts down its servers for good? I think the answer to that is not a technical one. If a sever is owned by an organization (not-for-profit) and it pays it’s cloud provider bills, it’ll stay up forever.

          If you mean what happens if there’s a technical issue and the server data is lost, that’s a different and solved issue. Create database backups. Easy peasy.

        • Good question. Not sure what the best procedure might be here. Could be as simple promoting them in order of initial mirror deployment dates and the others become mirrors for the newly activated instance.

          Triggering the activation could be a part of an instance decommissioning procedure where the operator selects the mirror to become the successor. Maybe there could be some basic system specs and network performance reporting so they could choose the optimal instance. Users would receive a message that their account is being moved to another instance and domain.

          In the event of an unexpected outage, there could be a deadman switch style timeout where the fastest mirror activates automatically after the original instance is out for long enough, but also a process for the operator of the downed instance to delay the takeover by signaling, “I’m working on it.” In the event of automatic takeover, since users wouldn’t be able to receive messages, there would have to be some sort of global lemmy notice system so users of the downed instance know where to go, like a sticky post on the front page or maybe just a separate “notices” page.

        •  HexTrace   ( @HexTrace@lemmy.ml ) 
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          211 months ago

          Definitely need some kind of replication/mirroring to occur between instances for DR, I was looking at how other decentralized systems for inspiration. Something like RAID where it’s tolerant of one or two drive failures could be translated to Lemmy. When you set up a new instance it allows you to opt-in to a peer network where you host backup content from several other instances and your instance is backed up to several other (non-overlapping) instances.

    •  Vega   ( @Vega@feddit.it ) 
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      1911 months ago

      IMHO, the problem is more subtle: nothing on the internet will stay forever, if you find a piece of information you like to save forever, you should save it locally AND with something like internet archive. A community can transfer to the same community in another server with proper forewarning. Finally, mastodon introduced the ability to move your account to another istance manteining your followers for quite a while now, maybe lemmy can find a way to introduce something like that too

    • No different than when voat went down or when Reddit goes down eventually. The goal is though that by having no big central point of failure it’s not as big of a deal. Not like you’d have to get used to a whole new kind of thing, just move to another instance.

  • If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you’ve missed the point. It’s federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.

    The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it’s interconnected, it’s self-managing, and it will scale only until it can’t and then it will peacefully split.

  •  Krusty   ( @Krusty@feddit.it ) 
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    241 year ago

    Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There’s plenty of ways to make money without VC.

    Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don’t know…

    Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that

    • I’ve always dreamed of, and now with even more Fediverse usage it might be easier to push, to have local municipal governments fund simple sites in the states as part of a pretty standard practice of creating community spaces, and so that local governments can have a site to host accounts without the chance of being censored by big tech in the future.

      • I empathize with this view - but I doubt this will ever happen. Ignoring the user training bits, and the legal bits (who is a mod, how do they do stuff), you need to have someone dedicated to fighting this though the IT/Security gauntlet. Now keep in mind im private sector (so it’s slightly different) - but we in IT generally have dimm views of hosting WebApps.

        All that said. Once one local gov does it the potential for it to spread radically increases.

  •  seirim   ( @seirim@lemmy.ml ) 
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    201 year ago

    I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.

  •  honk   ( @honk@feddit.de ) 
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    1111 months ago

    I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.

  • If you have ever browsed sites like questionablecontent.net, you may have noticed that they have a privately hosted ad server where people can reach out to Jeph and buy ads for his site.

    This is a fairly rare occurrence as the requirements for the ads that he approves are pretty strict from what I understand and he’s not just going to hawk the latest caffeinated Seltzer vitamin water blend to his followers.

    That being said there are a lot of self hosted ad platforms that can be easily monetized and allow the site owner to dictate exactly how intrusive the ads are where the ads are coming from and to ensure that the ads effectively blend into their site design.

    But a more realistic approach would be to ask users to pay an annual fee or something.

    If I knew that the community was fairly strong and robust I wouldn’t mind paying $10 a year or something to keep my community vibrant and strong, or rather than going with a fixed annual amount if they were to put out a donation drive the way Wikipedia does then I might be tempted to throw a little cash when I’m feeling flush.

  • like the rest of the Fediverse: through ingeniosity, community and self-organization!

    (understanding “make money” as “pay for its infrastructure and maybe for some dev and other of the essential work now ran by volunteers” not as “profit”)