Fediverse

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.

Monetizing is what ruins other places.

I like the way my home instance does financial backing through an open model, and that's part of why I chose it.

An ideal is enough contributors to keep the lights on and to reimburse the admins for their time spent in keeping it afloat. Moderation should always be a volunteer position for those that want to support their individual communities.

Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs (to a point), feature development and then charitable donations in that order. Non-profit on paper and in practice.

This is viable for a small instance. Maybe even larger ones if the users are altruistic enough as a whole.

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

Unsubstantiated claim: Any set of rules that aim at distributing money according to some merit can be exploited in a way that those who get the most money are not those providing the most value.

Or less formally: Any game can be cheesed.

Well there was sub.club but it died.

Crazy idea here: would it be possible to have a model where everyone's phone is a mini personal instance, syncing with others when the user opens the app? When a phone is offline that phones content would be unavailable too, but that is part of the truly decentralised model.

Instances could run stake pools and tie the two together somehow. Perhaps in this case, your username follows whatever pool you're staking to.

It's a solution look for a problem admittedly. It works better in the case that instances act as retail "clubs" like Costco for example. In that case, stakers to said pool could be authorized to get certain deals on products sold by that instance.

Would love to see an optional monthly subscription to Lemmy where funds are automatically distributed based on how you used Lemmy that month. There would have to be a lot of research on how to avoid exploitation, but Open Collective might have some good examples of how to securely handle funds like that

Something along the lines of a monthly donation model, perhaps with a nominal "pro" system. A badge to showing that you donate and how many years you've been donating (users can disable display of such badges if they want).

Truly fair would be to have corporations pay.the users to allow them to show them advertisements.

I've been wondering if there's an opportunity for instance admins (e.g. lemmy.world) to offer managed instances for user domains.

It would be great if it was easier for the average person to own a domain and use it for email, matrix, Lemmy, etc.

Look at what nostr community is doing with zaps, I think it's cool

Still learning about the fediverse, but... What about a simple percentage system so you can donate whatever you want. A large portion goes to the instance that you register with and smaller portions go to Lemmy programmers. Maybe portions can be set aside for parts of the fediverse that we all use like gif/video hosting. I'd say make the percentages the same across the fediverse so people know what goes where.

Personally I'd prefer monthly giving like patreon.

I think keep it donation based. Perhaps do a Lemmy gold where u can donate to boost a comment/post and said donation is split between content creator community instance etc.