- Of course, people should donate to make Lemmy sustainable.
- I recognize that this is true of any website that is not enshitified or, more broadly, is designed to maximize profits. Websites made with libre software are the public libraries of the internet!
A library is paid though.
Donate to your instance, and decentralize the Fediverse.
Do you mean by taxes?
Where i come from you can go there and read for free, but if you want to borrow stuff you need to have a card which is paid my an abo.
And they will also get money by the city likely
NYC libraries are free, but asshole conservatives (but I repeat myself) don’t want to fund them.
That’s sucks.
In my country I’m pretty sure library cards are always free. The card has to be collected in person though.
Welcome to Germany! Fucking hell here
In my city/county, you get a free card if you can prove you live here (show something with your address) Our system will also do fundraisers to supplement the budget from taxes. We almost lost some libraries a gew years ago, but voters remade the local government and they are safer now.
It’s not even expensive. A single euro monthly per user is more then enough to keep instances running
The problem is that micro-payments are a pain in the ass. On Liberapay I often pay people 2 years in advance which is then pretty much
I’m not suggesting to pay one euro each month, I’m suggesting that you treat your lemmy instance as a 12 euro per year subscription. Compared to literally every other service it is basically free.
/me taking a 3 hour sink shower in the bathroom
Mfer people got heroin to do! Wtf is taking so long?
I’m paying for the hosting of my single user instance.
You’ve got a good point: the showerthought kinda breaks down in some cases, like yours! I guess the showerthought applies to public instances such as lemmy.ml
What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.
What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month
- Lemmy
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- my ruby on rails website + blog
- my old PHP website + blog
- another old PHP blog
- my sisters PHP website
- my sisters static website
- Firefox Sync server
- my bands static website
- a matrix server with some bridges
- a syncthing instance
- a TTRSS instance
- another static website
and I probably forgot some things.
Love this! Did you start out on the Fediverse or did you start on another and then move to your own?
I ask because I’ve been considering hosting my own for the family. I already have a server.
The thing holding me back is I’ve gotten my Mastodon and Lemmy accounts really nice with content and it’s daunting to think of moving/remaking accounts.
My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Lemmy’s issue is that it’s non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough
Not including the time cost to manage it.
That’s exactly my point, though.
I was trying to say that the hardware cost to host it may not be expensive, but the management cost could be quite costly.
But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Doesn’t lemmy sync posts, comments, and pictures with other instances? I remember after a CP attack some instances manually turned it off in the code to avoid troubles, and also had to clear their storage.
It absolutely does. Think of lemmy like of email – your mail server has all the email you received.
It’s like a public library that lets you borrow and read books from other cities’ libraries!
But it doesn’t have lots of useful stuff that makes people want to come here :(
That’s called interlibrary loan and it predates the internet by a long time.
1876 officially. Unofficially, centuries before.
I’m pretty sure most libraries also have that.
Yes, we have interlibrary loan.
Instant interlibrary loan!
Interlibrary loans are a wonder of the world and a glory of civilization
-Jo Walton, Among Others
I did a 1 time donation to my instance and the devs that should cover more than a few years of me watching ads.
It’s weird though because I really value the idea of supporting projects I like but I find it so hard to part with money when I am not forced. This does become easier as I become more financially stable.
I feel gross hording money at this point. I buy a lot of shit for my hobbies but I hate buying fast food and usually just buy two and give the second away as punishment for the sin.
I’m getting weird in my old age.
To be honest with myself, I am kind of the same. For the lemmy devs and lemmy.world, there are 1€ / month tiers on patreon. Its not that much but at the very least its more than nothing.
Can I use the printer?
Hosting is not free.
neither is running a library
No but Lemmy is not publicly funded so people should send them a few bucks every now and then.
No one said it was?
People should tip their servers, what they can afford.
It’s worth it
Well put
“You mean it just exists so people can share shitposts and memes? No engagement goals to please advertisers and shareholders?”
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.
(Self aware double entendre in that statement)
You do need to donate
We need tax money
God no
Well no, otherwise it wouldn’t be a donation
I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
I just need a place to shitpost for stress relief, I get drawn into deeper discussions but my main goal is to be as thoughtless and as dumb as possible Wheeeeeeeee
You might however be watching ads. And probably not realize it.
(Although, to be fair, right now we’re probably much too small for anyone to bother doing much astroturfing)Even if there was astroturfing, I wouldn’t say that counters OP’s arguments any more than it would if some guy came in and started handing out coupons to a pizza place in the local public library.
For now…
I am curious about a few of your worst case expectations.
Admins secretly taking money to inject stealth ads? I don’t know the mechanisms too well but it’d be nice to know where the cancer is likely to start from.
Well, if you want your instance to stay up you should expect to pitch in for operating costs…
I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That’s 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.
If everyone donated 12€ a year then they’d be so flush with cash that it’d make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.
I ensure my instance stays up, by running my own :)
