cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1239521
Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much “gold” was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.
We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.
Its definitely something that can be added by the side of the instances, not in general in the main Lemmy branch.
Considering a ton of people left Reddit due to shit mobile apps, most people probably won’t even see it since it wouldn’t be visible there
Apps are the most comfortable way to access online services. Most people will ignore it, if it was present. So in the end there is no change if it is shows to a few power users that use the browser because or all users, because who is going to donate are going to be the power users mostly.
This whole thing has been a “getting old” moment for me. I had no clue just how many people were only accessing the internet through a phone.
I use both, but don’t bother with social media on my desktop. Phone access feels nicer to use and requires less context switching, since I don’t have to swap between desktop and mobile interfacing.
Besides, I use a computer all day for work and for my side projects, I need to get up and do things outside of my office, which requires mobile access
Hard disagree honestly. There are tons of people who would be happy to support if they knew it was an option. I’m a software engineer but generally don’t access this on anything but phone because web is usually lower performance and I can’t pin it to my home screen. Native always feels nicer to use.
People use third party apps and wont see it in the side bar. Besides having it part of the code will make it easy for each server to easily implement it and it can be automated in the future.
Do you really want instances tracking their own uptime?
UPDATE server.uptime SET uptime=100%; commit;I don’t think I said that
I must have misunderstood your comment then.
I thought you meant, instances displaying their own uptime in the sidebar.
Disregard.
Yeah, this makes sense. The health of the instance we’re on is our concern too. Since a Fediverse instance is not a faceless entity and doesn’t pull the same capitalist shenanigans on its users, the users will probably be more willing to support it with donations if they see something like this. Many other donation-funded sites have something similar.
Initially, it’s probably fine to have it included in the server rules blurb on the side, but it should probably just be part of the API for mobile clients, and possibly communicated to other servers too? So if some valuable content is on an instance that’s not doing well, you can deal with that. If it regularly gets valuable content but can’t sustain itself, people might donate even if it’s not their home instance. Otherwise, it can be copied somewhere safe, if it’s basically abandoned.
Great idea! I think Lemmy and kbin could do with plugin systems, so instances could easily add something like this and other instance specific features if they want to.
definitely agree, but it shouldn’t be just funds for server costs, also funds that go towards the developers of lemmy. if we want lemmy to improve, this needs to become the developer’s primary full-time job, and the only way to do that is to have a much more substantial amount of funds coming their way each month.
Multiple bars and a breakdown for each would be fantastic.
Yeah this would be great and much more transparent than how reddit did it
I’d prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I’d hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve’s, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.
A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I’d need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don’t get my direct debit date in sync.
A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we’d need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.
Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.
In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat’s Slackware or Theo’s OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.
A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that’s currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.
Anecdata for sure, but my commercial instance for Mastodon, Matrix and XMPP (and now, Lemmy) has been going for a lot longer than a lot of “popular” Mastodon instances. I’ve seen already my fair share of “community-based” instances that the admins simply burned out.
Comparing support for open source projects is not the same as comparing for the support of an specific instance of the server. People that use Slackware/OpenBSD/Gentoo depend on their developers, so if any of the devs stopped working, they would have to find another Linux distribution. If an instance admin is struggling to keep up, the freeloaders are more likely to jump ship than start donating and nowadays there there is always yet-another instance popping up.
Thanks, appreciate the insight. I did not consider that and am still trying to get grasp of things.
I mentioned Pat & Theo as it seems on the few occasions they do reach out to keep the servers running beyond current donations, people do reach out to help with running costs. People don’t jump ship and the community persists for decades.
If a linux distro is struggling to keep up, freeloading users will often jump ship too. Linux isn’t short on distros to choose from or small community distros that died.
I’m not sure what you provide…what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service?
what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service
For the flagship instances (Lemmy, Mastodon and the @communick.com Matrix/XMPP servers):
- Being paid-only basically guarantees that no bots or trolls will be in that instance. Charging just a little of money is profoundly effective deterrent of bad actors.
- The instance is a way to connect to the fediverse at large. It’s more of an utility that a tightly-knit network. Because of that, the (admittedly few) people using are not worried about drama, “community rules”, or anything like that.
- It’s really cheap: you can get access for as low as $0.50/month if you come with a group of 10 people, or $10/year for solo accounts.
- It’s fairer than the “donation-based” instances: I heard people saying things like “I’m donating $20/month to my instance”, which might be something that I’d understand if they just want to feel good about a cause, but from an economic point of view it’s absolute insane. It destroys any pretense of “community” and establishes a very bad dynamic between admins, donors and freeloaders.
- Things are predictable and reliable. In the previous waves of migration from Twitter to Mastodon, there was a good amount of new signups, but it wasn’t from people who just wanted to try it out and leave the next day. That makes my life a lot easier for capacity planning, dealing with requests from actual customers, etc.
For the Managed Hosting servers, the answer is simple: if you can host your own instance on your own, great! But there are plenty of people out there who are more interested in having an instance that works well for them than dealing with the technical aspects of running an instance.
Awesome & thank you, makes sense.
I’m freeloading from FMHY, kbin.social and mastondon.uk as I try to figure out how this works and been playing around with self hosting instances, this is interesting.
A small fee for a safe and reliable place seems reasonable, cheers for the post :)
Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.
How is that supposed to work, though?
Like, say I’m wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don’t say shit. Big Gargamel doesn’t say shit. How would the “undeclared funding” bar know?
Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.
Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it’s bulletproof.
Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.
You’ve got it!
People just won’t lie about ill gotten gains, tax returns or funding on lemmy instances. The green bar will be truth.
The reason the enshittification of reddit and everything is because at the end of the day bills need to be paid and developers need to take breaks or pass on work to other. Look at how the mobile lemmy app mlem got treated so badly and was too stressed to keep developing it… Servers cost money. Open source software development cost money. Just like Wikipedia i want to support it to ensure it can stay sustainable. Making it easier for people to see the health of the server helps keep it sustainable and alive
Reddit was maintained by unpaid mods. It it now being shat on by unpaid mods.
I appreciate the need for funding I just don’t see the ‘funds health bar’ being useful fediverse server feature.
Reddit is clearly owned by Venture Capitalists that are forcing the site to go to shit so they can fill their pockets with ad revenue. If we self funded reddit or forums etc so that we can keep ot sustainable and focused on being the best instead of making a small number of people an infinite amount of money we would still have the reddit we love.
