Have a portion of my taxes be set to pay for fediverse general stuff, or for the fediverse instances hosted on my own country. Honestly, with how important remaking the internet is this should be being managed at the level of the big payers, not at the level of individual payers for whom a donation has more fees attached than the donation amount itself...
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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It's called Web Monetisation. It's a standard that's in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the "tip" button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say "I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction". Or anything else you can come up with.
That's it. The website operator doesn't need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you're done.
I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn't know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.
No monetization, donations only without begging.
Have any of you guys ever hosted... anything? It's not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say "server costs are expensive" are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
There are a few ways to monetise the Fediverse.
- Donations - to devs and those running the instances. Lemmy gets enough from donations and grants to have a couple of full-time devs but it still doesn't pay a lot. dansup using Kickstarter is proving interesting. Donations to your instance works well and a lot of places that offer this bring in enough to cover hosting costs but not much more. Open Collective has proved very good in this regard.
- Classified ads - [email protected] does a decent job of bringing buyers and sellers together.
- Subscription newsletters/blogs - Ghost is moving into the same space as Substack but with federation, so should do well.
So you wouldn't be able to give up the day job by running an instance but you might if you were the lead devs of a popular service or if you had a thriving following on Ghost.
I don’t see why the Fediverse can’t be run as non-profit and by volunteers. We are 8 billion people on this planet. I’m sure we can handle it.
We can and we are.
It's just that useful idiots have been convinced that nobody does anything because they actually want to do it.
To them, the only reason to do something is to make money from it or distract them from bigger issues. It's why their lives only consist of working and playing video games.
The problem is if you run as volunteer only you can only recruit from people who are socioeconomically privileged enough to volunteer. Having a revenue model isn't always about making a single person rich, it can be about being able to properly compensate people for their time, knowledge and experience who otherwise would not be able to because other responsibilities prevent them from it.
I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don't look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
But do you remember how they monetized email
They...? If you choose to pay for something you can be getting for free, it's kind of your fault for being a useful idiot.
Yeah, the largest email company is probably Google (maybe Microsoft). Google definitely looks at every email they receive for users!
I don't use Gmail. There are plenty of email providers out there that is completely free without ads and privacy focused. Mailfence, Tutanota, ProtonMail etc. Personally I use my ISP provider that is actually pro privacy - Bahnhof . That due it is a niche and if you don't save logs you don't have the log storage cost.
If feddit.nu (only 50 users) did not exist I would have chosen to self-host it on the free Oracle VPS teir.
The claim was "Email server owners don't look at the content". This is untrue since possibly the largest owner of email servers looks at the content to monetize the service. That's all.
They are not suppose to do that. It is disrespect to the user privacy. Hence good opportunity to change owner. Just a design flaw of the protocol that makes it possible to abuse that. Gmail is just one single provider, but yes, many more does it and Gmail is big.
First question, why would we want monetization? people do amateur theatre, short movies for fun, volunteer do coach kids sport for fun so the whole society doesn't have to be commercial, and even Wikipedia is mostly ran by volunteers.
I mean sure, federated instance and some authors may get government grant for culture (which would be better spend than for commercial movies, or all the government money spent in AI) but not monetizing won't prevent people from contributing
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
No, they really aren't, and they scale with users.
Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.
I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.
Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Doesn't that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It's just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they're willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn't bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I've always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what's the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.
We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
We need to stop discussing server costs without including actual numbers.
Why? The premise is that the costs might be too expensive for someone. Whether someone finds paying 12€/a too expensive or 1200€/a too expensive doesn't really make a difference. Either way it's too expensive, isn't it? 🤗
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