I absolutely believe the Fediverse needs to remain a space built on transparency, autonomy, and equity for users, instance admins, and developers working on ActivityPub. Look at the current state of social media, power and money concentrated in the hands of a few, stifling innovation and undermining trust. The centralized model isn’t just flawed, I think it’s had a devastating impact on an entire generation.
The Fediverse offers us a chance to rethink how the internet should work. It’s not just about being a space for free expression; it’s also about proving that a values-driven model can support those who keep the lights on. My main question is, can we implement monetization that honors our commitment to fairness, transparency, and equity, while still ensuring that the people supporting the network earn a livable wage?
This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about creating a sustainable ecosystem that empowers us all to build and maintain a trustworthy digital space. The Fediverse is already a success in its own right, but to truly evolve and thrive, I would argue we need a resource model that can drive sustainable innovation and meaningful progress.
TL;DR: I’d quit my day job tomorrow if I could secure a living wage from this work. Many in tech whold do the same. Is a monetization model that fairly compensates those who support and sustain the Fediverse possible?
Have a portion of my taxes be set to pay for fediverse general stuff, or for the fediverse instances hosted on my own country. Honestly, with how important remaking the internet is this should be being managed at the level of the big payers, not at the level of individual payers for whom a donation has more fees attached than the donation amount itself…
It’s called Web Monetisation. It’s a standard that’s in development. In short, you, the user, can donate/pay money on any website that follows the standard. No patreon, no PayPal, no VISA, no yada yada.
Setup: You install an extension or use a compatible browser, create a wallet with a web payment provider, login / connect with the extension / browser.
Example operation: while browsing you happen upon a website (Lemmy.world for example) or web page (tilvids.com/u/thelinuxexperiment or one of the video pages), the “tip” button is made available, you hit it and 1£ is queued to be sent to the website or person on the webpage. At your leisure, you accept the transaction.
This can be implemented any number of ways e.g statistics are collected (locally) about which websites you visited with web monetisation active, at the end of the month, you are shown a breakdown of that activity. Say 10% peertube, 30% Lemmy, 40% mastodon, and a smattering of other softwares. You say “I want 10£ to be split across the different softwares with a minimum of 1£ per transaction”. Or anything else you can come up with.
That’s it. The website operator doesn’t need you to have PayPal, or patreon, or some special bank. You have a " wallet", you decide how the money is transfered and to whom, and you’re done.
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.
Unsubstantiated claim:
I’d say reality pretty cleanly substantiates this.
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.
That’s pretty cool, I didn’t know that about lemmy.zip
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 - !flohmarkt@lemmy.ca 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.
I agree. Look at email servers. It just works out. Email server owners don’t look at the content. They just host the servers. Both protocols are federated.
Forums will most likely be driven by the community and volunteers. Just move everyone over to the fediverse. Then it should be easier to find such people.
But do you remember how they monetized email
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.
I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.
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
I would love this, great idea
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
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Servers and bandwidth can be expensive yo
Doesn’t that just mean federation instance maintainers are self-selected among those members of the community who can afford them in the first place? It’s just a less distributed form of a donation system. Instead of relying on 50 people making a 1$ donation each to pay a 50$ hosting bill, you rely on one person (the maintainer of the instance) making a single 50$ donation. That the maintainer wants to donate is already established, how much they can afford to donate can always be reflected by how much they’re willing to let their instance grow.
That doesn’t bode well for the longevity of any single instance, but I’ve always assumed the general idea was to have as many small instances as possible anyway instead of few big ones, otherwise what’s the point of federation. And if you avoid big instances then there will never be a need to funnel funds into big hosting bills.
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.
That would increase so much the costs of keeping my phone operating that I’d have to set up an obligatory payment system.
That would drain your battery pretty quickly since it would need to be communicating with other instances constantly
Well there was sub.club but it died.
Truly fair would be to have corporations pay.the users to allow them to show them advertisements.
I mean honestly, why not? If a server admin chargers a $1 per ad the user should get $0.50. Crude example but you get the idea.
Look at what nostr community is doing with zaps, I think it’s cool
Lot of terrible ideas here, if any of them are implemented lemmy loses a lot if value, donation model works, if a server cant survive itll shutdown and well end up in a better situation since the whole point was to not have centralized servers. Mfs talking about adding ads when this platform barely provides value lol. Like are you serious, at least most platforms with ads developed their own platform and arent just launching someone elses work on a server
If you want lemmy instances to be better off reduce the load, make your own or join a less popular one, joining a bigger one isn’t a good thing (im a hypocrite, im on lemmee)
