this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2021
72 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43404 readers
890 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Same. I'd love for us to grow, but never at the expense of it becoming overwhelming. I'd much rather have a bunch of smaller, community / interest focused, interconnected instances, than a giant one that values growth above all.
Our goal for this instance at least is just for it to be an enjoyable experience.
Would it actually be that bad having a giant commercial-centric instance, ie. something closer to Reddit than Lemmy. I mean imagine if Reddit could federate with Lemmy right now, then you could still choose the instance you want, but subscribe to the mainstream sphere that you also want to follow.
Someone could start one, but I doubt many would use it, as most ppl don't like seeing ads.
I think you're right, It's probably hard to find a business model around federation. Maybe it could work for enterprice on premise setups, similar to how Matrix is used in German healthcare. But I don't see how that would map to Lemmy in particular.
IMO the only funding that federation needs, is for developers, not really hosting costs. Most instances can be run on $5-10 dollar a month VPS's.
Wikipedia has the best model (or at least used to, nowadays they have far more funding than they could ever need, and their requests are just annoying), where they do yearly funding drives. When our NLNet funding runs out, we will most likely have to do something similar in order to continue working on lemmy full-time.
Its a sad state of affairs, because most fediverse projects have < 3 developers, yet we all make less in donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Eventually I think it'll be a good idea to have yearly campaigns where we share all the fediverse projects that need funding, along with their liberapay / OpenCollective accounts. We all would prefer to stay donation funded, to remain free of any business or political entanglements.
Right, it's a shame that there isn't a better culture for supporting developers like there are for other things online. Maybe it's because you rarely see the actual person(s) behind the software, as you do with say influencers or streamers.
Maybe platforms like Open Collective can help making open software more financially viable. I also like the trend of big corporations sponsoring the software they build upon, like for example Blender: https://fund.blender.org/
Babel (a web compiler) also wrote a relevant blog post some month ago Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?