I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year
I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.
That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.
Thank you for being transparent. This helps those of us who don’t know how to spool up our own instance figure out how much to donate. Much appreciated.
Why does it cost that much?
Are you hosting it on a hosting platform somewhere?
$15/mo server rental, plus a few dollars to store backups on a separate service, object storage for media, email, and domain registration. Total $18.64
I have a home server that could easily handle it, but I wouldn’t want to put something so public on it.
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If you’ve already got the infrastructure in place for other projects, it can drop costs dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone there was already doing a lot of web hosting and just threw this in their stack. There are also a number of housing companies that will cut great deals for non profits if they’re at up right.
If you want to see your instance survive, see what you instance admins have in mind regarding funding.
And donate. Depending on how many users there are, but 10 bucks a year per user would bring instances a long way.
That makes sense! But I’m also curious is this the only way of income without relying stupid ads, or can you think of other things?
Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.
I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different
Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess
Until you get into image/video/file hosting, it’s very cheap. So long as people are ok with off-site storage usage, then it shouldn’t cost much at all.
Merch is a pretty big risk, or at least was when I was doing it for bands. I know there are solutions for on demand creation now that might be more feasible
Honestly the images aren’t TOO bad, or not as bad as you’d think. I have 160GB right now and pay less than $2/mo for it.
Of course with more active users that’ll scale quickly at which point I’d probably tighten up on the upload limits.
I’m also using Cloudflare R2, I could move to something like Backblaze (which I already use for backups) and could possibly lower that.
Thanks! I’m glad to hear that!
I mean… you could try merch…? not much else
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Good for them! Other instances might need it, so it depends
Well, Mastodon has been around since 2016 IIRC which is nearly 8 years and it’s still growing and expanding. There’s no reason to suppose Lemmy will be any different.
A large part of the issue of sustainability is intent. Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Google etc are profit driven. By that standard, no fediverse software is sustainable because for-profits only care about continual growth leading to continual profit.
Lemmy is open source. No one who develops it or hosts an instance really cares about it being financially profitable so there’s not that motivation. The motivation is more akin to doing something positive for people and at the same time, indulge in a hobby/interest they have. If the people who benefit from it (you and me, the users) recognise that benefit I would hope they donate to its development and the instance they’re on. This in turn enables the users who can’t afford to donate to still be able to participate in a system where profit is not King.
So sustainability in the fediverse really means ‘can I afford to keep doing something I enjoy doing?’ As long as they can, it’s sustainable.
Just to add to this, to my knowledge the Lemmy model does not prevent monetization. So, if you want to try to start an Instance and someday monetize it, you can try if you want.
You’ll be competing with all the other Instances still, but if yours is unique and offers great value, you could potentially turn this into a job.
I would have no issues if Ruud decided to quit his day job and admin LW full time, paying himself a reasonable, middle class salary from the server donations. So long as he remained transparent about it all like he has been so far.
Honestly, I actually hope this happens someday, because it would make a different kind of far more common monetization a tiny bit less likely. That’s just selling the Instance. It’s his, on his hardware, so if someone offered him 5 million for it, he could just sell it. But if he’s drawing a salary from it, and he loves it, he may not be so willing to sell out. He wouldn’t necessarily need the money, because we’d already be paying him directly.
I wouldn’t have an issue with this either - within reason. But I suspect making an instance a de facto business from which an admin draws a wage would raise so many issues about a whole raft of things it probably wouldn’t be worth it.
I actually hope that some dev work goes into providing “premium features” for paying subscribers. Things like profile cosmetics, awards, “superlikes”, gif embeds, maybe sub only communities/threads. I view all of these as perfectly acceptable premium features that folks pay for on platforms like Discord that don’t deter free users. If it helps make instances sustainable and keeps high quality admin & moderation in place, I would argue it would be a big community benefit.
Another possibility is instance - as - affiliate where the admin sets up affiliate accounts with services like VPN, Amazon, a web host, etc. To enable users to buy things they would already and give a kickback to the instance.
Thanks for your comprehensive answer, it explained a lot for me!
Here’s what interests me: obviously on a single instance you need to scale the infrastructure as more users join. But how much do you need to scale to account for the usage of federated instances?
I ask that because the answer in this thread is broadly “it’s sustainable because each instance is low cost, and you can always add more instances” but that doesn’t work if, after the number of instances grows 100x, all existing instances face an increase in costs even if they didn’t gain many more users, because they’re receiving more messages from federated instances, and need to download and store stuff from those other instances for their local users.
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
My line of thinking is really wondering about what optimisations are necessary to allow Lemmy to scale in this way. Large social media sites have very interesting designs to deal with the huge amount of data flowing through them, caching as much as possible close to where it will be needed. I don’t know about Lemmy’s design though and I don’t really have a good idea of how that would impact optimisations.
To take an example I remember from reddit (actually I had to re-read about it because I didn’t really remember it…) reddit caches ordered lists of things, for example, the list of posts on the homepage. The problem is that the ordering has to be reevaluated all the time because it can change whenever someone votes. (Let’s assume we’re looking at a listing which incorporates voting). To make that work efficiently the reddit programmers made vote processing actually update not just the backing store and invalidate the cache, but modify the “cache” directly, which is now more like a denormalised view of the backing data. The way this was done meant that later, when the rate of votes increased, there were again problems because all this processing was contending on these denormalised views. I’m thinking this is probably going to be complicated by the federated aspect, because that’s a separate source of updates from those local sources.
I would also say that you can’t expect linear scaling for donations: early adopters are going to be enthusiasts, and correspondingly more enthusiastic with their money!
You mean say I have an instance with 100 users.
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
I think it’s more sustainable then Facebook ,Twitter and others. Why? Because it’s federated! if one instance goes bankrupt or shuts down for whatever reason it doesn’t close down the entire program. If anything, at worst a portion of Lemy communities would get erased from history. Lemmy in reality is really just an interface, with a bunch of different instances combined to provide the content. The cost is actually cheaper then other social platforms from the last 10 years+ like Facebook because in a way the cost for the “service” is divided by all the different instances hosted by volunteers,
I hope this makes sense, if any questions do ask.
I run lemmy.mindoki.com on a pc I built from spare parts (40€ dell plus for fun I got a hexa core for 50-ish and swapped out the celeron gold), only new “expensive” thing is the mechanical hard drive I guess but it’s really not needed. I had it laying around and there were already an SSD. I also had the website so no hidden cost there either.
So it heats up my bedroom (but not enough, so the electricity cost is nil ATM).
I don’t really have users though 😅
Did you follow some sort of guide. I have some spare dell 730xd in my barn I wouldn’t mind tossing into my rack again. I just don’t have a clue on setting up an instance. I would also have to get this thing on its own vlan for obv reasons. Or a DMZ.
No plan just moving ahead one error after another :-D
I was fresh to dockers, nginx, setting up a certificate for Https… but eventually it happened.
The community helped me a lot too.
Maintaining a website with donations as the only source of revenue is sustainable.
Are there any good and well known examples of this at a large scale, beyond Wikipedia and it’s projects?
Not that Wikipedia is not evidence in it’s own right that it could work, I’m just curious.
I’m not sure what you have in mind. Archive.org?
That’s a great example. Expensive to operate, entirely non-profit, and been around since forever.
Glad I could help!
Sorry that I don’t have an answer to your direct question, but
It doesn’t necessarily need to be at a large scale, because of federation. The technical knowledge needed to admin an instance is a barrier to entry now, but probably can be improved. We could eventually see an ecosystem where your WoW guild (or your college buds, or your found family, or your fantasy football league, or equivalent smaller community) hosts an instance for its members. You can still participate in federated discussions, and the subscriptions of the instance could stay comparatively filtered to what’s most important to the users of the instance.
You’ll always have bigger generalist instances, but the flexibility you can have with really small and topical ones shouldn’t be forgotten about imo, especially as the platforms/technologies mature.
plus it’s federated, not just a single site. The cost for hosting services are divided by instance so say one instance goes down, that doesn’t kill the entire program, although it would erase a portion of communities from Lemmy history in such a situation. Also it would be cheaper to host a Lemmy instance as the prices of hosting the instances that build up Lemmy are divided.
I don’t see why not - there are loads of other sites, let’s say DDL (roms etc) and various self-hosted blogs that chug along for years at the expense to the owner.
With Lemmy, the main concern would be growing storage, but that’s mostly solved by using something like B2 or Wasabi to store images, instead of the local server. B2 also recently changed their plans to make it free to download to a certain extent (prior to this, you had to pay for downloads) which makes this route even more viable.
I’m aware of lemmyworld and dbzer0 being very public about their donations, and lemmyml has been run by the devs years before we migrated. Lemmee’s admin is extremely active in the fediverse so that’s likely to stay too. We’ve only migrated from reddit in the past few months, so i’d say a lot of lessons have been learned in that time, as well as the viability/sustainability of running reasonably big instances.
A fair few have folded in that time too, some just disappearing out of the blue (vlemmy, lemmyuk, lemmyfilm) and others not able to manage the moderation as well as abusive users. I don’t think any have folded from it being too expensive to run - but I could of course be wrong there.
Personally, my blog site costs about $200/yr to run out of pocket, and is quite manageable at around $16/mo - comparable to a multiple-screen HD netflix subscription maybe. For a moderately used lemmy instance maybe you’d be paying $600/yr - about $50/mo which is still reasonably manageable. If just two users donated $50, your out-of-pocket costs drop to around $40. If all your users donated $2, assuming 100 users, your out of pocket drops to around $34.
The last time I checked, the largest instance Lemmyworld costs over $1k/mo to run (this also includes sister site mastodonworld, which is on separate infra but managed by the same core admin team IIRC). As of today there is a 4 month donation buffer, but looking at the graph on OpenCollective at least it looks like the admin team may need to cover a few hundred $ out of pocket if the buffer runs out, as monthly recurring donations is lower than the infra expenses. There are occasionally some very generous donors so I think it’s financially sustainable for the time being.
Overall I don’t think there’s anything to be worried about, this is the fediverse so you’re free to have an identity on any instance and still interact with the various communities. It’s not like Digg or Myspace where “when it’s gone, it’s gone”.
Depending on how larger instances go about monetizing, at a smaller scale donations can work. But once you hit a certain threshold costs for things like storage and staff go up a ton and pure donations will stop being enough.
Not at any scale.
Besides funding you already have enough infighting, power mods, and admins shaping content according to political belief.
So tell years fun now everyone is going to defed against most instances and it’ll be even more of a pain in the ass to see content and it’s going to continue to get reposted across the instances you do interact with.
So like, lemmy will be here but it’s going to end up more like a traditional forum than interconnected communities.
I disagree, because with a forum, generally it was just one server right to begin with? It’s just a little bit different then the fediverse in that forums didn’t federate at all. Time will tell what will happen to the fediverse. I would pay close attention to Mastodon as it has the most users off all federated services. Whatever happens to to it are signs, look out for them
