2y ago

It seems that for a large Lemmy instance to be sustainabile long term (especially at the level of traffic reddit sees) it requires ads and/or raising enough donations like Wikipedia

Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they're going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?

19 comments

No single instance should get to the size of 100 million users if we are doing federation correctly.
- So if the ideal Lemmy structure is a large number of medium sized instances, would you say there should be a mechanism (either at the API level or handled by clients) to randomly select a general purpose instance at sign up?
So don't run large instances. Either selfhost at home if you're on symmetric fiber or use cheap ARM cloud instances.
- Its fine if "most" people don't want to selfhost. In a small instance only 0.1% of the people using it need to do it.
You are not supposed to have large instances. This is a self inflicted problem. The entire point of federated is to have many small instances and share the load.
Lemmy.world decided to accept more than 100k users. Ok fine, but the rest of the instances don't have this problem whatsoever. We actually want more users on our instances.
And I knew this would happen. I was watching it grow and I knew eventually it would be a question about how to finance it, and I knew users would talk as if it's a problem for Lemmy itself. It's not, it's a problem for Lemmy.world.
I mean sure, if it's possible to only have ads for Lemmy.world users... Then go ahead and watch your ads. But I don't think the rest of the instances want that experience.
Nope. Donations are enough.
Especially cost/donation ratio should get lower on large scale.
Limit instances to 2000 users. Rely on donations. Once the software will be mature enough, we will know exactly how much it costs per users. Users can even pay for others (I wouldn't mind cover the costs for users I would know who could not afford it).
Ads require tracking to be valuable
- i'd say 6-7k users would be a better figure, but i do agree with your overall point. anything above 10-15k just hurts the health of the federation in the long term and ends up creating "untouchable" servers. even worse on lemmy where communities are also bound to instances.
  though now that i'm thinking about it, a better metric would be active users rather than total users
  
  I just gave 2k because it seems that today it's the sweet spot in terms of resources consumption, and thus cost. Maybe that can evolve in the future?
  But thanks federation, that should not affect the experience too much. You could even imagine large instances such as LW having LWprime, LWsecond, etc.
I think the solution is not getting large. The Federation is designed for lots of instances that can interact with another. Wikipedia is different, they have centralised servers. If you run an instances you can limit how many accounts you allow.
No advertisements. Period. Donations should be enough, especially if instances remain small like they are intended to. The federated internet is not about becoming reddit, which many people misunderstand. It's supposed to be something different, and one of the keys to that difference is avoiding corporate interests driving the site. Advertisements kill that instantly. If you want ads, go use meta shit.
It's good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users' well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.
There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?
The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm "growth is good".
- do we really have evidence that the problems with a lot of mainstream social media has to do with size? there are shitty smaller sites like for example kiwifarms was vile but not very big. And other sites are expansive like linkedin or quora but pretty benign (if boring) AFAIK.
  A lot of people who are comfortable with tech have a hard time remembering how unusual that is. We are all clustered together with each other so it becomes normalized. But think of all the facebook, tik tok, reddit, instagram users int he world. Who will run services for them?
  It's all well and good for us nerdy types to say "OK, one out of every few hundred of us is going to run a little server". And we can support that because the % of people who have the skills and resources is extremely high.
  For the rest of the population, who is going to put the kind of community cultivation in to setting things up, convincing people to move, orienting users, etc? If this plan was to be viable it would need to have a small army of volunteers to commit to creating instances for specific communities far outside of tech.
- i overall agree.
  one point i struggle agreeing / see what you mean is small instances mean small communities.
  I'm on lemmy.ml, but i use lemmy as federated, i don't see the lemmy.ml community when on lemmy, but the fediverse.
  in a way I don't care on what instance i am.
  i come from a distributed systems background and to ne this is normal.
  is that anti fediverse?
Advertisements distort the market arrangement. When one uses advertisements to generate revenue, it inherently creates a situation where the advertisers are the actual customers. This incentivizes the site toward the needs of the advertisers instead of the users in any situation where those needs don't align.
So yes, eventually it would be the end of the world. Within a decade or two the site would go to hell. We're seeing it already with most ad based sites. People are complaining Google is getting bad. We already know that Reddit is. That's why most of us are here. News sites go to shit, when they distort themselves for advertisers. Example after example of advertising, making site after site worse over time.
The advertising model, is the original sin of the internet.
\ We need to find another way.
- Or subscription, or freemium, or merch, or raffles. Lots of options beyond that even.
Why are so many of you hoping to recreate Reddit? No one tried to turn Facebook into MySpace, no one is trying to turn Substack into LiveJournal… Platforms fade, people move on, new platforms crop up. That’s the circle of life on the web.
- just checked. my livejournal is still up. last post 2005. i heard a rumour the site was purchased by russia or something? someone is paying the server bills.
We should never have ads.
We should simplify the process for lemmy servers to display how much the servers are costing monthly, how much funds are coming in monthly, and the way for people to donate monthly.

19 comments