As long there are no invasive data collection and such, I really wouldn’t mind having some ads if that means making instances having more resources to grow and sustain them selves.
I am not fine with that. This should be community driven and not ad driven.
Server space or electricity wise, running an instance will never be free, and it will be more and more expensive as more and more successful Lemmy becomes.
Donations and such will only get Lemmy so far.
Most of the people on he major communities like reddit were all on smaller communities long before. The internet has a long tradition of indie providers helping with the commons. Keeping things running can be done in a number of ways and many people are willing to foot the bill for an instance.
The issue you bring is more a problem when everyone insists that we all must be on a handfull of instances.
The protocol does not need this and the attitude feels like mainly a cope for UX issues.
The Mastodon servers do it and I am sure Lemmy can do it as well. It also helps spread people to more servers.
Most instance admins aren’t here for profit. I’m hosting mine on dedicated hardware I already pay for, so it’s zero added cost, even if I have to scale up a good bit. And if my instance grows too much for its bare metal server, I’ll port it to a Helm chart and migrate to my production k8s cluster. Anything to avoid ads!
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Nooooot exactly.
See the way federation works is that each community on each instance has a list of other instances that has at least one subscriber on it. Every time someone does something on that community, such as commenting/voting/posting, it sends that information out to every instance on its list.
So say there’s three instances (A, B, and C).
A has 1000 users.
B has 500
C has 10,000
Let’s say they’re all subscribed to some particular community on instance B.
A user on Instance A comments on a post. Instance A sends this comment to Instance B. Instance B tells Instance C about it so everybody is synced up (and presumably, tells A just to confirm they’ve received it).
So one action means instance B has to send out 1 or 2 messages to other servers, and in just those two messages was able to serve 11k users (plus it’s own 500)
Now let’s say all 11,500 users ran their own instance, and this community was on one of them. Again, it’s a super popular community and everyone else is subscribed. Call it instance X.
Now, someone comments on a post on this community. Instance X now has to send a message to 11,499 instances. Every single action on this hypothetical network will cause several thousand messages to fly between them. Not efficient to say the least.
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As someone else pointed out: according to Apollo dev Reddit gets at absolute most 12 cents per user per month from ads. Without data collection the ads would be far less profitable, so I’d say that donating 1 dollar a YEAR would actually result in more revenue for the maintainers than ads.
I like the idea of community fundraising drives more. Digital advertising sucks and is a scummy industry. They all exist to collect your data, track you, and sell data to the highest bidder.
Seriously. Donate to your instances folks! I will happily contribute to an experience without ads.
I like the fund drive idea alot.
What do they use your data for? Selling more ads? Sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme.
What do they use your data for? Selling more ads? Sounds a lot like a pyramid scheme.
Anything that makes a buck. They’ll use it internally to boost ad targeting, then sell it to data brokers who can do whatever they please- primarily selling it to other companies.
There is nothing to stop your as data winding up in the hands of someone like your health insurer. Then, if they see you’re being served a ton of cigarette ads, they could easily imply you have a smoking habit and jack up your insurance.
Lots of other bad things can happen with this data, there’s very little regulation around the ad industry (outside of GDPR and CCPA).
No. Please no.
Internet ads exist to track users, and all those tracking pixels can also cause performance issues. Ads basically don’t even make that much money per impression and for the most part just frustrate people. It’s a lose/lose for everyone.
Yes, caveat that I think ads in general shouldn’t exist. I don’t know if Lemmy is the right place to begin a war on the ad economy, though.
Edit: Not OP, just someone who agrees with the basic premise.
I will gladly donate, just please don’t dirty this beautiful thing we have going here with ads every other post.
Ads are the bane of my existence. The only thing in my life that almost makes my blood boil.
I apologize if I’m offending anyone, but I hate ads. 🙂
(FYI I’m not OP)
The good news is that ads will never be on every instance.
Oh hey I knew you weren’t OP. Sorry if I sounded mad in my response. Not mad at OP either! I just really dislike advertising and all the scummy practices that go with it.
Sounds like something an ad would say… Hmmm?
I think it’s a much better idea to normalize donations to Lemmy instances.
It’s highly problematic to bring advertisers into the fray. As others have mentioned, with ads comes tracking and targeting. Data used for unintended or unknown purposes. It seems antithetical to the community most are trying to build here.
I’m donating specifically to stop this from ever happening.
Absolutely not!
The attention based, advertisement business model is the “original sin” of the internet. If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product. You are what’s being sold. It changes all the incentives for the site. It’s why social media and news media have become so toxic and polarizing.
It’s why Reddit has made every one of it’s unpopular decisions. It made them, to create a better product for it’s customers (advertisers), not because it makes a better experience for us. If we want the best site for us, we need to be the customer. That means we need to be the ones who pay for it.
This is absolutely, undeniably a bad idea.
No ads EVER. I’m still learning Lemmy, I wish I could set up my own instance but have no idea where to begin.
Oh god no. Let us know how much you need so we can as communities figure out together but let ads be the last resource. I know the ads always win but man would it be nice if that wasn’t always the case. I never saw the reddit ads and am spoiled (reason #1 why i am here now) i have hope and i will try to always give money and time to the one social media network i actually use and enjoy.
Please no. I’d rather contribute actual dollars (and I do!) to ensure the success of my preferred instances.
Dude just throw them a cent (and I mean quite literally, a penny). People really overestimate how little profitable ads are in the year of our Lord 2023, specially for how much a PITA they are.
The Apollo dev gave recently some GREATLY optimistic estimates of how much Reddit earns per user, around 12 cents per month. Yeah no, I prefer donating twelve cents thank you very much.
its possible as long as its not a drive for profit, the primary issue with these kinds of tools is that making the profitable kills them in a big way.
ill be running an Ad-free instance.
Truly an unpopular opinion lol. Like others have said, I would gladly setup a recurring donation to sustain my instance. From what I’ve read, most instances are relatively low cost as long as their user count remains small.
Another thing I’d be willing to do is pay a small monthly fee to host an instance on a server somewhere. I’d restrict the user count to ensure the cost to host remains low.
I’d prefer both of those options over ads. It’s unnecessary considering the entire idea of the fediverse is to spread out users across many small instances instead of having some huge costly monolithic instance.
I’m not cool with that at all. I am, however, cool with the idea of an affordable “Lemmy Gold” that can be awarded to posts for increased visibility, and that money could go towards sustaining the server. Private torrent sites cover their costs and then some easily with donations. There’s no reason that Lemmy couldn’t do the same as long as they don’t get obsessed with data collection and ad targeting.
I’d rather spend a couple bucks donating than see ads. If I was on an instance that decided to add ads I’d change instances and if ads were in the communities themselves I’d find a similar ad free community.
I really don’t want advertising.
We have things like Patreon and crypto. It’s much easier to organise some community funding there. This is the better way to do this.
