Reddit CEO signals subreddits requiring a subscription fee coming this year
How will Reddit generate content for paid-for subreddits?
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Well, that’s the death of the free* forum. Went from BBS to newsgroups to phpBB to Reddit, each soft-killing its predecessor. But like WalMart killing Main Street, Reddit is going to kill the free forum.
Thank goodness for Lemmy and other free* social network software.
*free with the asterisk because we know it’s not free, we are enjoying the service that others volunteer to pay for.
Lemmy will need ads to support individual servers, eventually, when they're not attached to another org (like a server CNN would run for just outgoing news dissemination). The rest of them, with bills and needing to eat, may need to go to ads.
I support proper ads that do not get priority placement and aren't in-your-face.
I support prioritization of profile migration so we can vote with our feet if a particular server's ad volume and content offends our sensibilities.
But I'm just saying I fully expect some ads are gonna happen, and I hope we can prevent full enshittification when that happens.
No, it will never have ads. If the devs put ads in, it will get forked. If server admins put in ads, they will be defederated. That's nonnegotiable if you want a free (as in libre) fediverse.
Mastodon is way bigger than Lemmy and it doesn't need ads. Donations and subscriptions (for severs that choose that path) are enough.
I don't want it to have ads either but bandwidth is not free and someone somewhere is paying for it.
Is the donations don't cover the bills there are few options.
We run one of then largest lemmy server. We're fully donation-funded. Lemmy.world is also the largest, also donation funded.
Is the donations don’t cover the bills there are few options.
They usually do. When we opened for donations, we pretty much hit our goals within days and our donations currently exceed our expenses without having to do donation drives. @Blaze@feddit.org had a thread where Lemmy Admins discussed their costs and a lot are already fully funded.
I really enjoyed the Reddit gold model. I paid them $30/year for many years because I got so much out of the site that I felt they deserved it. Their monetization was pretty innocuous.
Then the enshittification happened.
And there's a scaling problem, right? Like, the bigger the federation is, the more traffic each instance gets.
Maybe large institutions (universities, some governments, some companies, and so on) can each host their own instance. It would be a drop in their existing hosting costs.
You're getting very close to describing how Usenet works.
Heh, is that a bad thing? I think not.
It's not free, but it's pretty cheap. When you don't have to have massive marketing departments, huge management bonuses, expensive office space, crappy proprietary software, and massively scaled highly available platforms it costs a lot less to run a social media platform. Donations can often cover it all.
If one server gets too big, they can just cap registrations and people move to a different server.
At some point they are going to need lawyers, and more expensive anti-spam.
Good point. Way less staff to keep this service running as long as growth is not a priority like it is with most companies.
