109
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2023
109 points (95.8% liked)
Lemmy.ca's Main Community
3600 readers
4 users here now
Welcome to the lemmy.ca/c/main community!
All new users on lemmy.ca are automatically subscribed to this community, so this is the place to read announcements, make suggestions, and chat about the goings-on of lemmy.ca.
For support requests specific to lemmy.ca, you can use [email protected].
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
Lemmy and Kbin are just open-source software that can be run on servers. To answer your question, in short, the community has the most influence over the fediverse.
I don't have a problem with the software ... I know it is open source and made available - its the main reason why I went onto Lemmy and Kbin
I'm not so concerned with the software .... its the costs of running these services that end up becoming an issue with users, instance owners and admins ... running services takes money, renting servers takes money, bandwidth takes money, having people run, operate and maintain these services is unpaid labour
I like using these things for free like anyone else ... but I think our community should build a culture of encouraging people to subscribe, pay or donate to instance owners, software developers, open source software in order to help the people that maintain these things and keep these services, software and projects out of corporate hands.
If we let them all suffer without funding ... the owners will eventually look for ways to make money on their own ... and depending on who these people are and how desperate they can become with rising costs ... Lemmy, Kbin, Mastadon could all grow to become the next corporate owned Reddit all over again
Your concerns are valid but the whole point of fediverse is so that anyone can host their own instances, as with the users are encouraged to sign up different instances instead of a central one so will the cost never be as astronomical as something like Youtube or Reddit and there will not be a catastrophic loss even if a major instance does go down. While I agree admins should be allowed to have donations accepted, I don’t think admins should treat this as a business at the first place.
TL;DR: For a not so huge volume instance, the cost isn’t as high as people would think, I believe the community can sustain itself.
It's hard to accept anything is 'free' these days. "If it's free, you're the product", comes to mind. It's not ad revenue clearly (yet). Are we giving info to data brokers? Someone somewhere has to be making money off this.
I don't particularly care that I'm being exploited for revenue, but I do like to know how the exploitation is happening.
It's a very sad commentary on the world we live in that we can't just have something nice as a community without someone trying to make a buck, but it's certainly what we're used to.