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Created a new community, [email protected], for the newly-released Age of Mythology game
(aussie.zone)
Created this account so I could create the community. Decided on lemm.ee because my main account is on aussie.zone, which does not allow community creation (and limits its communities to things about Australia). Figured lemm.ee is better than lemmy.world due to the latter's performance/federation issues.
Ok, so let's make it clear that the whole talk about "it would be nice to make it profitable" is not serious, and also make it clear that your idea of "supporting the instances" is just equivalent to cover the hardware costs, which is a rounding error compared to the cost of human labor involved.
There is just so much more going on that you are taking for granted, I don't even know where to start:
By saying that you are covering the cost of the hardware, you are basically saying that the work of everyone else is worth zero. This is downright offensive.
No, not really. At the moment I am more upset about the fact that you are one of the most active users here, that you jump instances every two weeks or so and yet you seem to think that contributing $1/year is "enough" to support the work of everyone involved here.
Imagine going to a farmer's market and saying "how come do you sell those eggs for 10€ a dozen, you can feed 25 chickens for a whole month with that, if they lay 1 egg per day you are getting 750 eggs, so I don't see why I should give more than 12/750 euros per egg." and tell me how well that's going to go.
First, the $29/year includes access to Mastodon, Matrix, Lemmy and Funkwhale, with 250GB of space. There is also a 20% pledge of profits to go to the underlying projects. I also need to pay for things that others might be skipping on, like backups, redundant servers, etc.
Second and most important: the $29/year is supposed to buy you peace of mind. My customers are not paying me to "share the costs". They are paying me so they can feel assured that there is one professional taking care of the infrastructure. They are paying me to ensure that I can worry about the bugs in the software instead of them. They are paying me so that they don't have to worry about the instance going under without notice. They are paying me because they know that these things do not come for free.
No, I'm not. I'm saying that I can still manage it if needed. My proposal would be to donate the instances to the team to get rid of this "single point of failure" that you are holding me against.
This is (so far) just a thought experiment, which I am making to illustrate how your logic is flawed. You are saying that my work is not worth the price that I am charging, yet at the same time you think that others will not be interested in doing because it takes time and expertise. Don't you see the contradiction here?
That's very eloquent, but you are still evading the most fundamental issue: If your idea of "growing the network" is to keep waiting to get more enthusiasts who are willing to sacrifice their time and sanity to serve 1-2 thousand users at a time, you are going to wait for a very. long. time. If everyone keeps treating this as a mere hobby, and if users keep thinking like you and refuse to pay for the professionals what they are worth, then the professionals are simply going to go work somewhere else. If you don't believe me, just look at what is happening with Mastodon and Bluesky.
I'm going to add to your list the time of people posting content and animating communities. I am happy to freely dedicates some of my time to it, and if someone would show up and say "community animators needs to be paid for their time", I would suggest them to go to Nostr, which seems to exactly address this issue, rather than here, where most of the people volunteer with their free time.
A comment from the Mbin lead dev yesterday (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/444176/-/comment/3956532 )
Based on the other thread, it seems to indeed cover the costs. I usually give 5€ per year for an instance I use a lot. Still much cheaper than the 30$ for your bundle. It's a free environment, people will go to places using the donation model they prefer.
Imagine opening a restaurant serving soup next to a kitchen soup where volunteers make and serve the exact same soup as yours, and tell me how that is going to work.
See above, peace of mind is similar on lemmy.dbzer0 for instance, and their admin still said
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21873104
They provided the CSAM detection tool and Fediseer. Those project have donations tools, but I've never seen their creators threatening to stop developing if they don't get enough money the way you are.
The single point of failure still stands as of today, and on top of that, the lack of organic content and communities creation on your communities is probably why you are not having as much users as you would like to.
It's not a contradiction. To come back to the volunteer kitchen soup above, it would be similar to donate 50 delivery trucks to a kitchen soup that does only manage one. They would need to park them, manage their insurance, broken tires, oil, etc, while they are doing fine with one truck, and that's how comfortable they are operating as volunteers.
LW host 18k monthly active users. Lemm.ee host 3k monthly active users. The issue is not with the number of instances, it is fine as of now, the issue is getting regular users.
Your perspective comes from someone who does not currently have a job and try to make the Fediverse profitable. Restaurant vs volunteer kitchen soup situation again. The vast majority of instance owners seem to indeed treat this as a hobby, hence are okay to give their time for free, and appreciate if donations cover the hosting costs.
Have a look at the other thread, there was only one other admin who shared your perspective.
I said it already, I'll repeat it: you have a much higher chance to get another source of income with another job than expecting people to pay 30$ a year for a bundle of Lemmy/Mastodon/Matrix.
Note that motivation to develop is a tricky business. I still have development motivation for FOSS, but it wanes and waxes seemingly on its own. Monetary compensation is there to help me maintain it a little bit further as it shows some direct appreciation, and I like when my voluntary work is also not costing me money 🙃
That said, I also recognize that there's other forms of contributions except monetary. If someone is contributing code, or sharing their GPU via the AI Horde, helping with documentation and community outreach, or even carrying niche lemmy community activity on their own, I consider it also valuable on its own, akin to monetary support. I do think that people who are mostly lurking and consuming the work I do, could find it in their hand to give something like 5$ a year or so. It doesn't take a lot of these people to provide enough to cover the costs of hosting and coffee.
Thank you for sharing your perspective!