I blogged about what happened in June, and the financial overview.
The transparency is much appreciated! Thank you and the whole admin/moderation team for everything you are doing to make lemmy.world a success.
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Thank you as always, I really appreciate the breakdowns and transparency. Also thank you for reminding users that you’re all volunteers and actual people running this, I’ve seen a lot of awful entitlement recently and some really unpleasant posts
Yes well you’ll always have that. Luckily that’s greatly outnumbered by the positive feedback /comments.
Wow, you’re running lemmy.world, mastodon.world, and calckey.world for 1200 EUR/month? Thtat’s kind of incredible. Lemmy.world says you have about 28k MAU (I assume that’s posting/commenting, not just logged-in users?), and mastodon.world says 37k active users (is that daily, weekly, or monthly?) So, that’s 65k active users (out of 200k-300k accounts) at 1.8 cents/month each.
The costs of community owned social media are even less than I had pictured.
Well there’s about 5 to 10 people constantly working on these servers, so if they weren’t volunteers, it would be a lot more… But yeah overall it’s quite efficient so far.
It’s so helpful to see the costs and the raise from donations each month.
Obviously there’s probably a spike associated with people coming from Reddit in traffic and in donations but I think it’s going to be important to keep track of these trends to make sure the team can build a reserve of funds to keep .world’s prospects nice and healthy.
Yes we keep the finances in the blog every month so trends can also be seen.
Would there be a point in setting up dedicated donation links for Lemmy.World? Some potential donors might be confused or hesitant because they see Mastodon in the name and they’re not using that service.
That would be a lot of work and extra bookkeeping… The costs like Hetzner and Wasabi and Mailgun are all in 1 account, same invoice. But we might make the branding on the Patreon/OpenCollective pages a bit more clear.
Appreciate your update and I’m glad to see more people donating.
I’ve been outspoken on my disinterest and resistance to Threads, but you and your team should not have been harrased like that…
That’s wrong regardless, but you guys have clearly been working your asses off to create this space for everyone, and people need to respect that you are doing this on your own free time for the benefit of others.
I feel I’ve leveled heavy criticism against federating with Threads, but this is something to be addressed with open discussion, not emotional reasoning and vitriol…
I see so many users acting like your team has already announced definitively to federate with Threads and that it’s implementation is immediately around the corner. That’s just not true… Instead of jumping to conclusions and throwing threats and tantrums, users should actually voice their concerns if they want them heard… That means arguing points, not threatening or insulting others…
I appreciate everything you guys have done and I’m sorry for how some in our community have acted. With that said, I still desperately hope that Threads is not federated with. But that’s a topic that should continue to be fleshed out within the community in a healthy manner.
Media storage costs seem to be pretty high considering how young this instance is. Are you considering adding a size cap (like some other instances) or another solution like rolling deletes in the future?
Media storage is mainly for Mastodon, which has around 10TB of media.
Hi Ruud, you mention in the linked Lemmy thread that you don’t see how Meta could ever EEE Lemmy.
I was wondering whether you’ve read the following blog post. If not, please do give it a read. It goes over how XMPP was embraced and then killed by Google, and the risks that same strategy poses for the Fediverse. I found it very enlightening.
https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html
Hi, thanks! Yes I’ve read that, and I don’t see how that could happen to Lemmy or Mastodon. I’ve see comments that people will follow their friends on Threads and then when Threads disconnects, people will leave Fediverse and join Threads. My question is why would they be on Fediverse and not on Twitter/Facebook, where their friends are now.
I mean I see what happened to XMPP but I don’t see that happening to Lemmy. It’s not the same. But feel free to chat with me about this, maybe I’m wrong and someone can convince me. My Matrix account is in my profile or just use DM.
So I wrote down some of my thoughts below, if you want to chat about it, feel free to leave a comment or DM me. (I don’t have Matrix, sorry)
So the core component of any social network is the network effect. In short, the reason we use Lemmy is because others also use Lemmy. We wouldn’t use it if there was nobody here (with thanks to Spez).
Indeed, that’s why people still use Reddit, Facebook, or any social medium: they don’t care about the platform, but about the people.
If Threads federates with Lemmy, they will instantly dominate the entire space: the most popular communities and most of the user activity will all be over there. (There are already 100M Threads users compared to under 2M Lemmy users, so this is essentially inevitable.)
If Meta would then later decide to defederate, the majority of Lemmings will be cut off from their communities. If in the meantime those communities had become important to them, their hand may be forced to sign up for Threads. Lemmy will survive, but it won’t be the same for most of its users.
Essentially, we have a choice to make: either we welcome Threads and accept that we will be at the whims of Meta for >90% of our communities and content (given their massively higher user count), OR we choose to be independent at the cost of having smaller communities and less content.
I would argue though, that having smaller communities may even be a pro rather than a con. I’ve seen many comments that the smaller scale of the Fediverse feels like a breath of fresh air compared to Reddit (and personally I agree with that).
That would be true if Threads would support communities. Which they don’t. If they ever would (which I don’t think) then this would be a valid point and need consideration.
For Meta, it would be trivial to add support for communities if they wanted, given that they wrote the entire Threads backend in-house anyway.
Also, even if they don’t support communities, their users might (perhaps even unknowingly) still be interacting with the Lemmyverse, just like Mastodon users can.
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