And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.
I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.
Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new sucker enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.
Lemm.ee didn’t shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn’t one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you’ll be getting.
Interesting… the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.
Most people don’t want to self host. And most people aren’t willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It’s a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn’t sustainable. I say it’s a cycle. The specific instances don’t matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there’s at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
Most people don’t want to self host.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\
The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can’t afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that’s not much of a problem. I’m glad I can host for some people who don’t have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don’t and that’s fine as well.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
You can’t ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
I don’t know how this dismise my point. Small instances dies all the time. I am more preoccupied by death of instances on oixelfed though
Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.
Small instances a lot more
Because there are more of them?
Isn’t https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy still a thing? Different model from you, though.
Put those under “self-hosting”.
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
I think it’s the best starting point. University and government resources can handle the volume and will motivate widespread adoption. In one sense, it is only kicking the can down the road, but it is kicking it into a future that will be better prepared for these questions.
I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.
How?
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn’t the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can’t “get rid of open registration instances.” That’s just stupid.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it’s just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they’ll find that free instances just aren’t an available.
Then all the Fediverse is, is just a bump in the road for Reddit and Twitter.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new
suckerenthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.Lemm.ee didn’t shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn’t one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you’ll be getting.
Not the nicest way to talk about @[email protected], @[email protected] or @[email protected]
Interesting… the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.
Most people don’t want to self host. And most people aren’t willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It’s a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn’t sustainable. I say it’s a cycle. The specific instances don’t matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there’s at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
That’s a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by… asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven’t done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don’t find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I’ll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You’re 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort ‘for free’ is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network… for free… is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it’s a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
they will have to enshittify to stay afloat, like allowing ads into instances, thats the reality if they want to grow.
i was thinking you could do ads for people not signed in, then no ads for people logged in
then for people logged in/signed up you could do discord style nitro benefits, fancy name tag, just extra stuff that supporters can get to show their support for the place
but in isolation no good because what’s to stop another instance just giving it away all for free? it’s like the place is self undermining, it’s the most cut throat environment to be in while being worse to work for than any it slave pen, at least at the end of the work week you get paid, here you’d be expected to work for free :\
The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can’t afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that’s not much of a problem. I’m glad I can host for some people who don’t have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don’t and that’s fine as well.