In addition to all of the answers here, development costs for protocols like ActivityPub can be partially offset by grants by organizations like W3C that work to build open standards.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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This has come up multiple times in recent weeks, naturally, but it's interesting that it's always framed as being about profitability. As if simply being affordable or sustainable isn't enough.
Communities being a source of free value for the server admin is always baked into the discussion.
Centralized, corporate social media has done... bad things for how we see and interact with the world.
Personally, I like the way the haiku project does it. They have a bar with how much they need on the website and as they get more donations, the bar starts filling up. I think the most important thing is to be transparent about your costs.
I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don't ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.
This. We need to stop seeing such online gatherings as opportunities to be profitable. I personally view them as social interactions and opportunities to exchange random and interesting information. Water cooler talks or forums (the ancient greek/roman sort - I wonder how many shitposts those had).
When you invite people over to your house for a gathering (also incurring costs - even if people bring something to cover the catering bit, you still have to clean up afterwards) you wouldn't consider it as an opportunity to profit right? (Or you are and are just hosting an MLM party or have some sort of agenda to push).
Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
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I'm not sure there is one answer here. I guess it all depends on the instance. Also consider that it's pretty early on, some instances might ask you money to join, others might ask for donations and yet others might show ads or be completely paid for by the hoster. Having a small instance doesn't necessarily need to cost a lot.
The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.
Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.
I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.
Lemmy has so far made $0 total profit. So that makes them substantially more profitable than Reddit.
I know you probably have seen a lot of answers from others already and my answer would probably be the same as others (for obvious reasons) but I am going to answer anyway because you told me not to lurk. Please note that I am not an expert (or even somebody who knows much about business) so don't expect my answers to even be half correct.
If by profitable you mean "not making a loss" then probably yes as long as if there are enough donations to cover the expense of running the server.
But if by profitable you mean "making enough money to be sustainable long term" then my answer would be most likely not because it's not designed to make money (unlike ahem...certain platform)
i contribute to patreons of lemmy.world and the developers of lemmy. hopefully there’s makes enough of us to make this financially viable
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They aren't, and due to the type of culture that is common here many users are outright hostile to any monetization other than charity. mastodon has had instances being defederated for the crime of attempting to introduce advertising or subscription.
It remains to be seen if this changes, but for now you're unlikely to start a fediverse instance for profit.
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Reddit the company has never been profitable either, it ran on VC investments for years. But more accurately, the real Reddit, the communities, never needed to be profitable because it was run out of passion for the subject matter of the subreddit. The former isn't a problem for the fediverse because there isn't an entity overseeing everything, the latter sorts itself out naturally as more motivated individuals join this community.
They aren't
Lemmy is a non-profit that receives grant funding through NLnet's NGI0 Discovery Fund. And also - individual giving.
Individual instances can fund themselves how they want. Besides donations - there’s certainly a world where some servers start hosting sponsored content to keep afloat. Given that users have so many alternatives, there’s a limit in how much they could get away with.
There’s also a world in which small government would run and operate instances if this gets popular enough. No reason why somewhere like Estonia can’t do so as a promotion of their booming tech industry.
Lemmy is a non-profit that receives grant funding through NLnet’s NGI0 Discovery Fund.
Okay, so I found the NLnet project page you alluded to and I've also checked Github and various pages on join-lemmy.org, but I haven't found anything that actually says how the project is organized from a tax perspective. I don't doubt @dessalines@lemmy.ml et al.'s egalitarian intent, but is it actually a an official non-profit organization (e.g. 501(c)3 or the equivalent in whatever country the project is incorporated in), or have they not yet bothered to do the paperwork to form a business entity separate from themselves as individuals, or what?
On the website: Stichting NLnet is a recognised philantropic non-profit foundation according to the Netherlands Tax Authority (Belastingdienst). Here is a link to NLnet's Articles of Association, which is in Dutch.
To be honest, I'm definitely not interested in this enough to do anymore research than that, but you're welcome to run it through Google Translate and see if you find anything. And report back if you like. I'm not well versed in European (specifically Dutch) non-profit space to have an opinion on this. If it was American, that's a different story.
I do see that the the NLnet Discovery Fund is itself funded by the EU's Horizon Europe program (formally Horizon 2020). Here is some details on that.
The way I'm reading it is that NLnet gave the developers of Lemmy a grant, but unless I'm mistaken, that doesn't usually mean that the developers are working for NLnet. Does NLnet manage the project funds directly (e.g. paying the developers a wage, acting as the recipient for web donations, etc.) or did it just disburse the grant to some other tax entity (e.g. what your "articles of association" link calls a "stichting," I guess?) that actually represents the Lemmy project?
Honestly, I'm only just kind of idly curious myself. I could probably find out simply by messaging the devs and asking, but it's probably not worth bothering them. I suspect that, if they haven't already, they'll create a proper non-profit foundation later.
Grant recipients don't necessarily need to file as foundation. For example, college students receive grants.
It's very possible NLnet manages funds that pay recipients as 1099-equivilent contractors. At which point, all Lemmy has to do is document that their grant money is used to sustain the mission to the Foundation.
Fun to speculate, but again - I don't really care enough about this to dive much deeper, lol.
Grant recipients don’t necessarily need to file as foundation. For example, college students receive grants.
It’s very possible NLnet manages funds that pay recipients as 1099-equivilent contractors. At which point, all Lemmy has to do is document that their grant money is used to sustain the mission to the Foundation.
Right, in other words, they receive it as business income for their sole proprietorship (or general partnership, or incorporated business entity), not as wages as an employee of the entity that awarded the grant. Point is, whatever the entity is, it would be separate from NLnet and therefore not necessarily a non-profit just because NLnet is.
Also, if the Lemmy devs are still acting as an unincorporated sole proprietorship or general partnership (with all the donations and such being treated as personal income and with no separation between business assets and personal assets), then the fact that the project is hockey-sticking right now means it's probably about time to get serious and incorporate, both to protect themselves legally by separating their personal and business finances, and so that they can apply to be an official non-profit entity and make donations tax-deductible.
it is more sustainable to pay for your small chunk of a network than to pay for a monolith that encompasses everything
i hope lemmy.world doesnt become too big for its own good and becomes to big to upkeep
If it becomes too big for them, then can always shut down sign ups and direct people to other instances.