Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
I see a lot of people willing to support the servers, but little conversation on how to support the admins. I support a living (and competitive) wage for folks, and don’t think instance admins should be doing this work for free. If you set up your own tiny instance for your family, sure, I bet you won’t be charging your family for it, but a huge instance with constant needs and a bunch of strangers is a totally different thing. Just donating toward server costs does not allow admins to pay their personal bills, while they put in hours of work to keep this place going. So, I appreciate you for including “admins” in the support needs!
I know a lot of people hate it but I wonder if crypto/digital donation would work. All you would need is a separate wallet setup to pay the host every month. Maybe even have a graph/chart showing how much is in the wallet vs how much the monthly bill is.
One problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being coupled with mainstream banks (where workers get their pay deposited) it is instead coupled with speculative assets employed by criminals. As such, choosing to work on accepting cryptocurrency instead of working on accepting real-money donations ties the service to a crime economy instead of a mainstream economy.
Good thing criminals never use cash, otherwise you could call the world economy criminal.
HSBC helping to launder money at the teller window with custom boxes must have been a fever dream.
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To add. USD hasn’t been backed by a real asset in nearly a century. It was once backed by gold but now the only thing backing it is full faith in the USA. At the moment that means something, it might not always.
You need to educate yourself on this stuff because you sound like a moron.
The difference is that the entire world economy would need to collapse for the US dollar to be worthless. Crypto can become worthless because some 22-year-old video game addict steals everyone’s deposit.
The USD, just like any other fiat currency, is backed by the trustworthiness of its central bank and the economic base of the currency area.
In other words: Euros are backed by the fact that if you’re in Italy and have a Euro, you can exchange it for an espresso. You can trust the ECB that it will do its darnest to keep prices stable, and you can trust Italians to continue making espresso, which means that the Euro indeed is a hard currency.
So you are saying that HSBC getting caught helping launder cartel money at the teller is fake news?
USD Is still the preferred currency of criminals across the world and even more so they use assets like paintings to facilitate non traceable payment and smuggle extremely large dollar amounts. They also use art work to launder money.
I’d suggest you pull your head out of your ass and get on the crypto train because it’s leaving you behind. Look at btc, ltc, dash and others.
I like this for the transparency but crypto is an open ledger, anyone can see the balance of any address at any time as well as see where the addresses where money was sent. Plenty of hosts now take crypto and most larger exchanges are tagged on explorers for btc, ltc, etc. That makes it easier for the public to keep an audit on what’s going on.
I know you can see how much is in a wallet, I would prefer a visualization of amount in the wallet vs how much the server costs.
I agree and said exactly that. It would show intent to be transparent if that was setup. My point is that even without that we can still keep an eye on things.
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Yeah, I used to pay $3/month for Apollo - would be very happy to donate that to lemmy server admins instead. My issue is that I don’t know what instance(s) to donate to given that I’m absorbing content from quite a few different instances at the moment. One of the issues with decentralisation is that I don’t really know who deserves my financial support the most! Maybe I’ll just donate to my home instance.
I’m dirt poor but I’ve donated to Wikipedia at least three times now. I use that website so often, it’s changed my life.
I have them some money after I graduated college. I had used them so much it felt right to give back a bit.
They’re not a perfect org bit they’re very much an org I’d prefer to continue to exist
Good for you. I like to think that every little helps.
You’ve inspired me to be honest. I really didn’t use much of Wikipedia in high school or university but I’ve definitely fallen down the wiki-hole very many times and leanred things that there’s no way I’d have learned if not for the convenience. Gonna donate them a fiver now; it ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
I’m glad to hear that! I’m the same, I don’t recall using it for school or uni, but I can’t begin to imagine how many random pages I’ve looked up as an adult. If it disappeared tomorrow I’d be gutted.
Beehaw has a periodic financial update. It would be great if each instance had a similar kind of update so that we can understand what is needed and where to help.
That gives me an idea!
https://lemmy.fbxl.net/post/37114
I like it, and it represents the spirit of the fediverse well, but power does cost money. It seems like you want to run a small hands off instance, which is great, but if it starts to grow you might want to keep that in mind.
One nice thing about using parts scavenged from roadside signs is they’re incredibly power efficient. If everything was pulling its full power, I think I’d be pulling 100W maximum, and they don’t run like that.
Fair enough! What exactly did you find on the side of the road that actually worked? It’s a fun idea for lots of servers.
Fanless commercial grade sign PCs are fairly available on the second hand market, relatively inexpensive, and they’re not super high powered, but they’re good enough for small instances of stuff.
Cool stuff! Thanks.
@Sal@mander.xyz Something for us as well maybe?
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to. The beauty of community projects and free software. I enjoy being a freeloader, thanks very much. I will contribute by making this an active project with my posts.
Right, and no one is even attempting to compel you to. In my opinion, this is one of those “within your means” kind of thing. If you went to your friends house, hung out, and drank his beer every weekend, month after month, his reaction might depend on your ability to contribute. If he knew you struggled to make ends meet, he might be just fine with it, especially if you tried to help out in other ways. He you make more money than he does, and he was the one scraping by, he might get resentful. Either way, he can’t compel you, but one is kind of shitty.
Some of us have more ability to financially support than others, and that’s fine. Last night I made a donation to the developers and another to my instance admins. I’m thinking about making that automatic monthly, but we’ll see. The point is, I think it’s fine if this is a bit socialistic, with some paying a lot, some paying a little, and others not paying at all, as long as the community is able to thrive. By the same token, some instance owners will likely consider it a hobby and not need/want any donations, while some others won’t be able to support growth without them.
Well, I will sound immensely selfish, and maybe it’s because I’ve been so used to “free everything” on the Internet, but I will never pay for an online service ever. I pirate all my books, all my TV shows, and use scripts and archive.is to read online newspapers and magazines for free. Life costs so much money already, I will never ever feel bothered to actually donate to an online service or free software.
If Lemmy.world goes down due to lack of funds, no problem from me. I’ll join a different instance and carry on. Or go back to Reddit.
I’ll happily admit to being a loafer on the Internet. I expect little from my services so long as I don’t have to pay shit for it.
I disagree with this attitude, but you’re for sure not alone. If everyone was like that, we just wouldn’t have a lot of things we do now.
When our boys were young and torrents and ad blockers were new, I tried to get them to understand that, while not everything is about money, people generally don’t invest huge amounts of their own time and money into things that they aren’t getting paid for. If everyone started using ad blockers, sites would close down or move to a subscription model because ads are what paid for content. If everyone stole their music, some bands might just hang it up or put less focus on making new music, etc.
And here we are: lots of publications have moved behind paywalls because they weren’t getting much ad revenue anymore, many have started putting out content that’s just regurgitated crap from Twitter and Reddit because they can’t afford journalists, and some have just gone under. Bands spend a lot more time touring because it’s harder to steal a concert so they make more money doing that than putting out albums (though the Spotify model has changed some things). People are all about stealing content and thinking they should get everything for free, but it really is selfish and unrealistic.
Here’s the thing: the rest of life (rent, food, retirement etc.) cost so much already that anything I can get for free or don’t have to pay for in some way I will make that choice to pirate or not pay. If capitalism wasn’t breathing down my neck with all this crazy inflation in food costs, rent increases, student loan repayments, etc., perhaps I would be more amenable to paying for newspapers and online services and all that nice to have stuff. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
You do sound immensely selfish.
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To boost active user count on Lemmy.
At least you have the self awareness that you are a selfish asshole, so that’s something I guess?
Rent and food come first for me. Online services are fungible. Like if it’s free to use or free to take, I’ll take advantage. We all have to eat first and some of us don’t earn enough money to donate to a free project. Donations are a luxury to me.
Don’t judge, 99% of the people using Lemmy and its various instances will never donate. We contribute happily through our posts.
I don’t think you know what fungible means.
I understand this position - I used to be of the “it’s the internet, steal anything that isn’t nailed down” mentality too.
And I still have a lot of that, to be fair. But COVID taught me a general lesson that I’ve been trying to take to heart: if you want nice things that cost money to function to keep existing, at some point people are going to need to chip in. My town lost a ton of good local businesses to the pandemic, and many others got dangerously close to closing. I don’t go out and support every local business, but shit I care about (my local independent movie theatre, live music venues, etc.) gets the amount of money I’m willing to contribute.
If people don’t do this, nice things either disappear or become less nice in an effort to secure funding by alternate means.
You’re welcome not to - the means exist where you don’t have to - but think about the declining quality of some of the stuff you enjoy and why that might be the case.
This might not compel you to, but the only way to keep Lemmy from turning into Reddit 2 is by donating so they don’t have to seek out investors. We all have to do what we can to help out - that said, by posting you are creating content for the website. That’s not nothing.
You need to be careful with this point, because it becomes addictive.
It’s 4AM and I just submitted a PR to the Liftoff app repo.