If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
I’m not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.
We hereby charge all users of lemmy seventy-billion dollars per GET request.
charge 10 doge per upvote
We think that’s a fair price! You just need to optimize your shit, garbage, utterly useless piece of crap app to not SUCK so much!
Great idea! Surely you could just charge, oh I don’t know, $20 million a year for it? That would easily cover operating costs and so much more!
I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.
Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.
And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.
But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they’re using, and the Lemmy devs?
Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?
Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?
The real donation is the infrastructure maintained by the many server admins.
Tip: you need a blank line between the quoted text and the follower for it to separate.
Try seeing this message’s source!
Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API
As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits
There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of active users, and none of them are ad supported. Donations generally are capable of paying the operating expenses, as long as the staff is halfway decent at creating a space that people appreciate.
But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they’re using, and the Lemmy devs?
Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?
Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?
Also, ads would only be useful when hitting the actual instance site in a browser, many (or most) users will use some sort of app I imagine.
Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.
Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.
28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.
I don’t know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.
The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.
I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.
These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it’s definitely enough to live. And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.
Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.
And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.
How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to “work for the portfolio”?
No one is talking about “a lot of money” here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a “co-op” all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.
I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.
Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don’t get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.
We wouldn’t be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.
Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we’re not even close yet), then we’ll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.
Even if you do not want to call your project a business, “we want enough to survive and pay rent” is too low of a bar to clear and not something attractive for prospective members of your collective.
I think I’m misunderstanding, €28k for 7 full time workers is more than enough?
It’s per month, not per year, so per year they’re receiving €336K, which seems more than enough to me unless people are demanding 6 figure salaries which are not really necessary.
Hmm ok, I’m not that aware of how much tax and what general cost of living is in the countries the 7 people are living in, so I guess €4000 (before tax)/month could be enough…
It depends entirely where people live, even inside countries can differ drastically - as an example, I currently live on around £23,000 a year before tax (about €29,000) while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount. This is in the north of England, but if you were to go further south, you would need a bit more most likely.
The discourse on the internet is that you seemingly need some crazy amount of money, but the average wages of places are nowhere near the figures people give, and most people are living alright, even if it’s not particularly extravagant.
This isn’t to say people should be living on scraps or anything, we’re all underpaid at the end of the day, but the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” you see on many (US-centric) places on the internet is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.
while living alone and have no issues and am able to save a decent amount.
Right, so basically this means that Lemmy (the company) will only be able to hire employees if they are single, young and in areas with low cost of living. Do you see the problem here?
we’re all underpaid at the end of the day.
Sorry, it seems you are projecting here. Even if that were true, going with this “we are all underpaid, so others should accept that as a fact of life” doesn’t really ring like a compelling point to attract people to work on Lemmy.
the usual “6 figures is barely getting by” (…) is verifiably false in the vast majority of places.
The point is not whether people could (or should) live on a salary of X or Y. The point no one should be pricing their work in terms of what they “need to get by” and instead they should be pricing themselves in terms of “how much value does my work produce”. When you leave to employers to determine how much you “need”, you get exploited.
Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.
I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.
I realized I’d much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called “the magic of thinking big”, and one of its points was to ask the question: “What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?”
We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.
I wasn’t worried about nutomic and you. We all appreciate what you guys are doing for us ex Redditors seeking a new platform, even more so that you are willing to sacrifice so much personal comfort just to bring joy and entertainment–two luxury goods–to all of us. Most people seeking a job are not in it for ideals though, so it’s not completely unreasonable to think that you might need to compete for your work force by offering salaries comparable to what’s common in your market.
I think he has a good point. I’m also more and more questioning my job, to the point that I reduced my my workload by 2.5x, to be able to focus on open source, although I’m now just earning enough to come around. But I’m learning much more, my skill has definitely increased in the last years in which I have focused on using the missing work time for developing open source. I’m having more fun with it: writing in the favorite language, actually relevant stuff, and if your open source contribution has actually a lot of feedback, and is (thankfully) used by a lot of people it certainly feels better than having finished a project in a corporate job. I think the QoL has certainly increased for me.
And I think these kind of people might be attracted to developing something like lemmy, and actually contributing something to society, the anarchistic thought of not being bound to these big centralized social media corporates (that produced quite a lot of bad press themselves the last few years…), and actually serve the community.
I guess France is not part of central Europe because 80k(even employer cost) for entry level position I never heard about it
Even 4k isn’t that easy to get at the beginning
And 4k (employer cost) is in the end like 2100e after all taxes
I don’t know about France. I live in one of your neighbouring countries and as a graduate or even undergrad software dev you won’t have a hard time finding a job that pays 60k+. 80k+ is rare but definitely also exists.
I live in Italy and here a 50k€ job is considered on the very high end for a senior developer. It means around 2500€/month (for 14 months) net and keep in mind that the medium job in Italy is just a bit less than 34k
oh okay, places i thought about it’s like 700e for a 3 rooms flat. And of course in France you have healthcare and stuff, but most likely the same in most of Europe
With the cost of living in country in east i think they could find skilled passionated devs, and pay them a fair price, which french companies already do (without the fair price)
I think unless you invest in servers this week it will look like Lemmy.ml crashing and redditors not considering it a viable option. The proprietary alternatives will do well.
Join-lemmy.org will stay up and point new users to working instances.
Just arrived on Lemmy through join-lemmy.org, and I could quickly find a server.
I first saw a post about lemmy.ml being out of capacity which lead me to join-lemmy.org
I guess most of refugee will do the same.
Still have to learn a lot, I still don’t know what are instance hosting, i guess profiles and subtopics, therefore if i interact on a sub hosted on lemmy.ml i guess I would also use it.
Well, going to study this
Thanks for this platform, even though reddit death was a liltle hope for me to waste less time on my phone !
Do you guys anticipate a massive increase in Lemmy traffic during the blackout, and are you preparing? It would be awesome to see Lemmy have the ability to seize the moment and capitalize here.
Yes its inevitable. join-lemmy.org is updated hourly so it will only show instances which are actually available. lemmy.ml will most likely go down at times.
Please make mod tools a top priority. It’s absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.
Hell, even if it isn’t strictly a mod tool, being able to do this from someone’s profile page would be good.
Wholeheartedly agree
Contributions welcome.
When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @[email protected] and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.
If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate
Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.
Just sent $44… My fav #.
You may want to be very open about how much has been donated and the costs. Else you are asking for a lot of unnecessary controversy. I can understand your motivation to work on such a project, given your openly displayed ideals, and community work ought to pay, too. But once you find the time for it, it might be beneficial to make some write-up on these philosophical points. There is a lot of combative folk around on the look-out for attack surface. I myself am old enough to understand that people develop and eventually are mature enough to see through ideology … eventually.
Thanks for all that you do. Signed up for recurring donations!
<3
Liberapay is much preferred
Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.
We did have a plan to rework that entire onboarding site this month, but then this whole thing happened. I’ll make sure that’s in there.
Has nlnet expressed interest in giving another grant?
This is our 3rd year of grants from NLNet, and they’re been more than generous with helping Lemmy get off the ground. I don’t think we’ll re-up for another year, as most of the bigger issues are done, and their resources should be spent getting other important but lesser-known projects off the ground.
deleted by creator
Liberapay is simpler, automatically splits payment between devs, and has no fees (other than the payment processor). They’re even funded by their own model.
Opencollective isn’t as good because you have to submit invoices to get paid.
Patreon is absolutely the worst because it’s not made for teams, and they take a big cut for essentially just running a wordpress for you with payment buttons.
The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do
also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao
Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There’s plenty of ways to make money without VC.
Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don’t know…
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/
They do get funding from NLNet
Yes! :)
What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That’s where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there’s a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.
That’s definitely my main concern I have with this federated infrastructure. It’s basically the same as IMAP email: if the server goes down, your account and everything it’s associated with goes down with it.
It’s a neat idea and has some benefits, but there really needs to be some sort of backup system in place. Maybe something like mirror instances, where anyone could spin up an instance with the sole purpose of mirroring another instance in case it goes down.
I was thinking this the other day. Without having read the spec, it seems like mirroring should be fairly straightforward - but then once an instance has gone down, how do the users find which mirror is promoted to the new main? Or should the mirrors be treated like backups, and just used to populate a new community on whatever instance is chosen (and then mirror from the new source)?
I’d like to see a live replication kind of thing. So if you’re on [email protected] it can merge with [email protected] and they super federate and advertise that this group exists, replicated, on four or five lemmy servers and the client tracks that every X hours and knows what the failovers are.
Solves some of the fragmentation issues and the backup/archive issues at the same time. Might even help with load balancing a bit if we have some kind of routing algo on the endpoints.
