With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.

Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.

How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people “group package”. Lemmy access is $8/year.

Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:

  • the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
  • Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can’t hide under the veil of anonymity.
  • You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won’t disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.

Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:

  • I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial…
  • The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won’t see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.

Last but not least: I’m offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.

Thank you for your attention, and don’t hesitate to ask anything.

  • @rglullisOPAEnglish
    8•11 months ago

    I can sign up on the website, choose one or more Fediverse services and pay the corresponding amount ($8 for Lemmy) each year.

    Correct.

    You will create and host an instance for me. To create and use an account on “my” instance, people will need to pay you first, the same fee as I do.

    Incorrect. The $8/year Lemmy plan gives you access to an account in the “flagship instance”. To get an an instance just for yourself, you would be looking into the “managed hosting” plans. Managed hosting is something completely differerent, you are in full control of the instance, the rules, who to invite, etc. This means that this offering of course has different price points.

    There will be no ads, all data stored will be only used to run the instances and the billing system.

    Correct

    You will donate 20 % of your profits to a FOSS organization like the Mozilla Foundation or Lemmy devs.

    Basically correct, but the important thing is that the idea that I will be donating to the projects related to services I am providing.

    To give a more concrete example: if 30% of the revenue comes from people paying for Lemmy, 40% from Mastodon, 20% from Pixelfed and 10% from Matrix, and if I get $100k in an year profit ( a man can dream), then I will be giving $6k to Lemmy, $8k to Mastodon, $4k to Pixelfed and $2k to the Matrix foundation.

    • ChaoticNeutralCzechEnglish
      1•11 months ago

      Thanks.

      What is the difference between your “flagship instance” and a normal one? You seem to mention

      • professional hosting, which I assume means a fast server and very low downtime, as well as good security and maintenance (such as updates)
      • longevity of the instance
      • lack of spam from local accounts (though I assume you federate similarly to other instances where spam can be posted so that should not matter as much)
      • @rglullisOPAEnglish
        1•11 months ago

        The “flagship” instances are the ones where Communick manages and the customers pay only for accounts:

        The “regular” ones are the those that the customer is getting a whole instance for themselves, and my “job” is to manage, keep it updated, run backups, etc. They need to have their own domain and they are fully responsible for moderation, who gets access to their instance, etc.