this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I think Beehaw and many other instances have golden hearts for their goal to start a stable, friendly community. However, like the article says, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Eventually, when an instance gets big enough, someone needs to be on watch to ensure things are running smoothly, someone needs to be working on updating, expanding, and improving the service. On top of the cost to run the service, it's unrealistic to expect it to be free. You can't expect the admins who have busted their ass to get this much done for free. Call it human nature or the ills of capitalism, but the fediverse can't run on community and goodwill alone. I saw another post a bit ago saying to expect to pay for internet services from now on. I think, at least in the realm of user-focused and FOSS-based stuff, that may be the paradigm. Donations or subscriptions should be expected, at least for some portion of users, to keep the lights on and compensate the folks keeping things moving.
Same can be said about Reddit, which is free to use. Having to pay to use Lemmy increases the barrier to entry even further
I think the deal is, you either pay cash or you pay with your data. While it definitely does increase friction for new users (and even existing users as finances fluctuate), a donation based system might be worth it. Something like wikipedia, archive.org, and other NPOs do. Incentives might be possible too, creating goals for getting X amount of donations to fund a specific improvement. It increases interest by defining a product or improvement, and increases buy-in by giving the donor the sense that they're directly improving the site through their donation.
The web3 community (and the area that I specialise in) hasn't really gotten deep into the fediverse yet, but there is actually some decent room for opportunities here.
An obvious one will be users sign up by locking up collateral to access a Lemmy instance, with the yield going to the admins. Users lose access by pulling out their principal and moving on.
I think it's interesting that we have absolutely no problem with a with an army of volunteers in the form of Reddit mods but it seems unthinkable to imagine instance admins would work for free, maybe even for the love of the community.