Please, tell me how “paying for hardware costs is enough”…

  • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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    6 days ago

    Seriously. If this is your main instance, set up monthly donations. Even if it’s just 1$/£/€ or whatever. Times 16k that’s $16,000+/month. I donate to mine every month.

    The fediverse is free because someone else is paying for it out of their own pocket. Not because they’re collecting and selling your private data. So do your part. It’s for the greater good and the freedom of the internet.

    • kat@orbi.camp
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      5 days ago

      I mean, unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating. Nobody should be expecting to setup an instance an expect tens of thousands of dollars a month.

      As an indie dev back in the day, it’s a fraction of uses are willing to fork anything at all.

      If anything, if you’re a whale, go big on your individual donation if you want a large impact.

      Either way, you shouldn’t need that much money to cover server costs for a mere 16,000 users.

      • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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        5 days ago

        I understand your point. But, I don’t think anyone here is creating instances in the hopes of collecting money. They’re just trying to keep the internet free (as in speech). And no, it probably doesn’t cost that much for a server with 16k users, but it still costs something and someone is paying for that out of pocket.

        We have to understand that we’re at a crossroads right now. Most of the internet is dominated by GAFAM and they control the access to information and how it’s provided. They control the narrative and have a huge bias in favor of unfettered capitalism and fascism. They not only use your own personal information for profit, but hey also benefit from government subsidies paid by taxpayers.

        Meanwhile you have a government that’s increasingly cutting funding for almost everything, including important organizations that fund critical open source projects.

        If we want a free (as in speech) internet, we have to understand it comes at a cost and we can’t rely on governments to fund these projects. It’s up to us to put our money where our mouth is.

        I’m by no means a whale. But, if us little fishes all band together, we can become even bigger than a whale.

      • rglullisOPA
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        5 days ago

        unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating

        It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.

        $10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to “free stuff” offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying “Everyone using the service needs to pay for it” is seen as an heretic.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
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      5 days ago

      Well.

      Users don’t really know what admins are up to.

      I’m 100% positive there’s state honeypot instances, and Lemmy being what it is you don’t even really need users on it to keep track of people.