Don’t know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:
Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It’s made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent’s vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.
A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.
In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens “cross-polinate” each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.
Well put
You do need to donate
I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
- Of course, people should donate to make Lemmy sustainable.
- I recognize that this is true of any website that is not enshitified or, more broadly, is designed to maximize profits. Websites made with libre software are the public libraries of the internet!
Well, if you want your instance to stay up you should expect to pitch in for operating costs…
I agree. Same as public libraries, someone pays for it, either through work or through money. So people should always donate to their instance if they are able to. Otherwise they are actively promoting the opposite: closed source, for profit, walled gardens.
I’m paying for the hosting of my single user instance.
What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Lemmy’s issue is that it’s non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.
But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Doesn’t lemmy sync posts, comments, and pictures with other instances? I remember after a CP attack some instances manually turned it off in the code to avoid troubles, and also had to clear their storage.
It absolutely does. Think of lemmy like of email – your mail server has all the email you received.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough
Not including the time cost to manage it.
That’s exactly my point, though.
Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.
What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month
- Lemmy
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- my ruby on rails website + blog
- my old PHP website + blog
- another old PHP blog
- my sisters PHP website
- my sisters static website
- Firefox Sync server
- my bands static website
- a matrix server with some bridges
- a syncthing instance
- a TTRSS instance
- another static website
and I probably forgot some things.
Love this! Did you start out on the Fediverse or did you start on another and then move to your own?
I ask because I’ve been considering hosting my own for the family. I already have a server.
The thing holding me back is I’ve gotten my Mastodon and Lemmy accounts really nice with content and it’s daunting to think of moving/remaking accounts.
You’ve got a good point: the showerthought kinda breaks down in some cases, like yours! I guess the showerthought applies to public instances such as lemmy.ml
You pay with engagement. !
Can I use the printer?
You might however be watching ads. And probably not realize it.
(Although, to be fair, right now we’re probably much too small for anyone to bother doing much astroturfing)Even if there was astroturfing, I wouldn’t say that counters OP’s arguments any more than it would if some guy came in and started handing out coupons to a pizza place in the local public library.
Wrong. You are expected to give me 10% of your wages via carrier pigeon or face consequences.
The irony of my app having (well, trying to) ads is not lost on me.
Yeah… Having ads in an app for FOSS software automatically makes it shit-tier for me. Even if they are blocked. I just really hate ads though.
/me taking a 3 hour sink shower in the bathroom
Mfer people got heroin to do! Wtf is taking so long?
I did a 1 time donation to my instance and the devs that should cover more than a few years of me watching ads.
It’s weird though because I really value the idea of supporting projects I like but I find it so hard to part with money when I am not forced. This does become easier as I become more financially stable.
To be honest with myself, I am kind of the same. For the lemmy devs and lemmy.world, there are 1€ / month tiers on patreon. Its not that much but at the very least its more than nothing.
I feel gross hording money at this point. I buy a lot of shit for my hobbies but I hate buying fast food and usually just buy two and give the second away as punishment for the sin.
I’m getting weird in my old age.
A library is paid though.
Donate to your instance, and decentralize the Fediverse.
Do you mean by taxes?
Where i come from you can go there and read for free, but if you want to borrow stuff you need to have a card which is paid my an abo.
And they will also get money by the city likely
In my city/county, you get a free card if you can prove you live here (show something with your address) Our system will also do fundraisers to supplement the budget from taxes. We almost lost some libraries a gew years ago, but voters remade the local government and they are safer now.
That’s sucks.
In my country I’m pretty sure library cards are always free. The card has to be collected in person though.
Welcome to Germany! Fucking hell here
NYC libraries are free, but asshole conservatives (but I repeat myself) don’t want to fund them.
It’s not even expensive. A single euro monthly per user is more then enough to keep instances running
The problem is that micro-payments are a pain in the ass. On Liberapay I often pay people 2 years in advance which is then pretty much
I’m not suggesting to pay one euro each month, I’m suggesting that you treat your lemmy instance as a 12 euro per year subscription. Compared to literally every other service it is basically free.
