this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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I feel like I got out just at the right time!
It's such a shame that everything has to be commodifed. Being on lemmy, free of ads and financial incentives is such a breath of fresh air. Community and sharing ideas shouldn't be driven by money.
I agree, but unfortunately it does cost money (way more than you think) to host something online, even a small Lemmy instance. The more traffic you have, the more it costs. The same goes for time spent on admin, which shouldn't be free unless it's a passion project.
which is exactly why the fediverse is so good! you can host it yourself and shoulder the cost, join a free instance, donate something small… the cost is shared among many, which makes it far more acceptable for a lot of small passion projects
You can say the same for lots of things though. I think if we want to take back control of discourse then we have to accept the cost.
An example from a world I understand - putting on and taking part in free parties (in the UK and the rest of Europe) has a financial and time cost. But people put on these incredible festivals not for financial gain, and not to even break even as there's no charge to get in, but because they love music and community. Some things are more important than profit.
Aren't Reddit moderators already volunteer admins? Still, Lemmy has the same issue as Reddit when considering server costs, if not worse. On Reddit, if a post brings in high volume of traffic, their server (farm?) needs to be strong to handle the influx. On Lemmy, the server instance can go down... theoretically. Not sure how much load a post can cause. But, compared to Reddit, Lemmy federated design means high load situations are suboptimal.
They are, and yet they have limited control over the discourse as we've seen over the last month.
I get your points - I'm interested and excited to see how the Feddiverse grows and I hope it remains sustainable. I feel uncharacteristically positive about it.
Reddit has a harsher delineation between mods and admins compared to Lemmy. It seems common for Lemmy admins to mod some of their communities, while that is really rare on Reddit.
Sure, but the decentralized nature of the fediverse means that a single failure point is no longer enough to take the entire thing down.
True but donations help, it's the best way to support this kind of projects IMO, doesn't cover admins time and the soul they pour into it but at least the server costs.
All it would take is one left-leaning billionaire to fund server costs for Lemmy instances with no strings attached, and we'd never have to worry about it being commodified. C'mon George Soros, where are you at? It would be pocket change for you.
So many far right billionaires putting so much money into their hateful, bigoted causes, while progressive causes seem to die on the vine due to lack of funding.
Problem is, you don't become a billionaire without massive amounts of exploiting people for profit, and someone like that isn't going to support Lemmy since there's no profit to be had. There are no left-leaning billionaires, only neo-liberal billionaires.
I hope he wasn't serious lol, he even has three arrows on his profile pic. It's such a corporate thing to say.