- 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
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.
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
NYC libraries are free, but asshole conservatives (but I repeat myself) don’t want to fund them.
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.
It’s like a public library that lets you borrow and read books from other cities’ libraries!
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’m pretty sure most libraries also have that.
That’s called interlibrary loan and it predates the internet by a long time.
1876 officially. Unofficially, centuries before.
But it doesn’t have lots of useful stuff that makes people want to come here :(
I’m paying for the hosting of my single user instance.
What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
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.
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.
Yeah, both with Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy I started on my own instances. Actually not quite, I had an Mastadon account for a day somewhere before I decided that I want to use it for real and installed my own instance.
My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
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
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.
People should tip their servers, what they can afford.
It’s worth it
No one said it was?
Don’t know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:
Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It’s made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent’s vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.
A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.
In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens “cross-polinate” each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.
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.
Libraries are paid for by taxes
Imagine an international tax founded fediverse with Lemmy, Mastodon, peertube and others. My personal dream.
That’ll be good for freedom of speech… /S?
Do suppose in some countries it can be deemed unconstitutional and/or illegal to censor ideas if such an instance existed
Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
Taxes are not direct payments and taxes would be collected regardless of the existence of libraries.
I dunno about where you live, but where I live libraries are funded by millage. We vote to fund the libraries specifically with a tax. So if we didn’t have the libraries, we wouldn’t pay that millage.
Taxes would still be collected, but not THAT tax.
Do you think you would pay any less in tax if there was no library?
Again, where I live, yes. If we, as voters, decided not to approve the library millage, we would no longer pay that specific tax which funds the library.
The library would coast for a bit, but would eventually shut down unless we voted to start paying that tax again.
I know this is true because it literally happened a few towns over where a bunch of dipshits voted to stop funding their library over LGBTQ books. Fortunately the library was kept afloat by donations until a millage was eventually approved to keep it funded.
a rate of 0.4119 mills
I would suggest that the tax cut in that case is so negligible as to be essentially nonexistent from a taxpayer’s perspective.
Well, sure, but that’s not the point. I’m just saying the tax money that I pay to fund the library is something I specifically pay to fund the library. If we didn’t have the library, my taxes would be lower by the amount of my taxes that goes towards the library.
(Obviously, libraries are a fantastic use of tax money and I would never vote not to pay the meager amount I do to fund them.)
Even if we were to accept that at face value, it does not change the fact that libraries are paid for by taxes, which was my exact statement. My point was not what you seem to interpret in any case. My point, if any, was that we get a lot of really cool stuff for taxes… And also that, as most other things, they are not actually free.
“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
I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
Well no, otherwise it wouldn’t be a donation
We need tax money
God no
You even get the homeless guy watching porn here.
I think a federation of smaller hobby run sites is going to be the only way to avoid the commercialised Internet, and all the negatives it involves.
that is how the internet started initially
Yep. I was around in the mid 90’s. Which was around when it became generally affordable to get internet at home.
I’d say most stuff was running from university computers though. Normal people couldn’t afford to have a permanent connection (even 64k) at home and in the few places co-location existed it was priced out of reach of normal people (and so were the servers you could install).
But it was still not even slightly commercialised.
/me taking a 3 hour sink shower in the bathroom
Mfer people got heroin to do! Wtf is taking so long?
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 :)
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.
