This is separate from the Communick Collective. The collective is just a way for people to support creators directly. My pledge of 20% is for the underlying projects. I am pledging to donate 20% of the profits to Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix Foundation, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Pixelfed, etc.

For that to happen Communick needs first to turn a profit, though.

It has been around USD 0.001~0.008, but they are scaling aggressively so fluctuations aren't as significant in the future regardless of usage. Details here: https://www.growthepie.com/fees

The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.

If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.

then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve

This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don't find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?

I'll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:

You're 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:

Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort 'for free' is a huge ask.

The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network... for free... is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.

You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it's a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing

This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money

And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.

The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small

You can't ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments

• Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say... Just like an email address or URL.

Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.

Let’s get rid of open registration instances

How?

Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have

But isn't the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?

You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can't "get rid of open registration instances." That's just stupid.

If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.

Most people don't want to self host. And most people aren't willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?

Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It's a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn't sustainable. I say it's a cycle. The specific instances don't matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there's at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.

No questions from my side, just a big thank you to mention Mbin, Lemmy, the Fediverse in that interview. It's probably the first time for me where I watch a video talking about all of this, which is curious with how part of my daily life it is.

I still haven't watched everything, but one of your quotes sounded resonated with me "We're only here for a short time. Why should we be a-holes to each other, and not just try to enjoy ourselves?"

Anyway, thank you for everything, take care!

I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I'm not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.

That's why I'm saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.

My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.

I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That's where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their "free" idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.

I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn't work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a "well gee we should just do this..." type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn't really exist today.

Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.

See, I'm fully aware this doesn't really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.

Jerry was in this thread, feel free to convince him rather than me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46526295/19376934

The reason they can't show ads is actually pretty simple: if I'm going to have ads in my feed, I'm just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you're going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn't care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed'ing from the ad-ridden instance.

For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.

No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn't have to care anymore.