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.

  • rglullisAEnglish
    3·
    2 years ago

    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.

    • knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      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?

      • rglullisAEnglish
        3·
        2 years ago

        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.

        • knowncarbage@lemmy.fmhy.mlEnglish
          1·
          2 years ago

          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 :)