• worfamerryman@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    I am so happy to see people coming together and moving away from commercial platforms. It feels silly to say it, but it seems like it is a step in the right direction. It is technological and social progress. Decentralization is a really fantastic tool and it seems to be a system that cannot be controlled internally or externally. Mastodon has been great, and I expect Lemmy to be even better.

    To anyone reading, if you have any extra cash, look into making a small donation to your instance. The people running it are not just putting in time, they are likely paying hundreds a month to rent server space.

    • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Money is going to be the deciding factor in the long-term health of the entire Fediverse. More users on each instance means more costs – and to some extent, even users not on that instance will contribute to cost. That money has to come from somewhere, and eventually, if the Fediverse is going to scale up to even a sizable portion of what we’re moving away from, we need real, consistent money involved. It doesn’t have to be full VC corpo junk, but eventually, some instances are going to need a team.

      I want this stuff to work great, but expecting the people running it to pay the cost forever isn’t sustainable.

      • mrchuckles@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        would it be a good idea to have comment/post rewards like gold/silver etc. where the proceeds go to help fund instances?

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          So… it could work. But that’s not going to be consistent, and the federated nature of things like Lemmy makes for some weird structures. Can you give rewards across instances? What if one instance has “gold” at $1, but another has it at $0.50?

      • JoeKrogan@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        They could add the sites as brave creators and get some revenue from that.Its depends on the number of users but anything helps

        • sydneybrokeit@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Unfortunately, the way federation works means that a 100 user instance that never grows past that can still see cost increases from the ecosystem growing. The number of network effects involved in all of this makes planning for meaningful sustainability a lot more difficult.