Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter’s performance/federation issues.
I’m going to add to your list the time of people posting content and animating communities. I am happy to freely dedicates some of my time to it, and if someone would show up and say “community animators needs to be paid for their time”, I would suggest them to go to Nostr, which seems to exactly address this issue, rather than here, where most of the people volunteer with their free time.
A comment from the Mbin lead dev yesterday (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/fediverse@lemmy.world/t/444176/-/comment/3956532 )
Based on the other thread, it seems to indeed cover the costs. I usually give 5€ per year for an instance I use a lot. Still much cheaper than the 30$ for your bundle. It’s a free environment, people will go to places using the donation model they prefer.
Imagine opening a restaurant serving soup next to a kitchen soup where volunteers make and serve the exact same soup as yours, and tell me how that is going to work.
See above, peace of mind is similar on lemmy.dbzer0 for instance, and their admin still said
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21873104
They provided the CSAM detection tool and Fediseer. Those project have donations tools, but I’ve never seen their creators threatening to stop developing if they don’t get enough money the way you are.
The single point of failure still stands as of today, and on top of that, the lack of organic content and communities creation on your communities is probably why you are not having as much users as you would like to.
It’s not a contradiction. To come back to the volunteer kitchen soup above, it would be similar to donate 50 delivery trucks to a kitchen soup that does only manage one. They would need to park them, manage their insurance, broken tires, oil, etc, while they are doing fine with one truck, and that’s how comfortable they are operating as volunteers.
LW host 18k monthly active users. Lemm.ee host 3k monthly active users. The issue is not with the number of instances, it is fine as of now, the issue is getting regular users.
Your perspective comes from someone who does not currently have a job and try to make the Fediverse profitable. Restaurant vs volunteer kitchen soup situation again. The vast majority of instance owners seem to indeed treat this as a hobby, hence are okay to give their time for free, and appreciate if donations cover the hosting costs.
Have a look at the other thread, there was only one other admin who shared your perspective.
I said it already, I’ll repeat it: you have a much higher chance to get another source of income with another job than expecting people to pay 30$ a year for a bundle of Lemmy/Mastodon/Matrix.
Note that motivation to develop is a tricky business. I still have development motivation for FOSS, but it wanes and waxes seemingly on its own. Monetary compensation is there to help me maintain it a little bit further as it shows some direct appreciation, and I like when my voluntary work is also not costing me money 🙃
That said, I also recognize that there’s other forms of contributions except monetary. If someone is contributing code, or sharing their GPU via the AI Horde, helping with documentation and community outreach, or even carrying niche lemmy community activity on their own, I consider it also valuable on its own, akin to monetary support. I do think that people who are mostly lurking and consuming the work I do, could find it in their hand to give something like 5$ a year or so. It doesn’t take a lot of these people to provide enough to cover the costs of hosting and coffee.
Thank you for sharing your perspective!