https://blog.mastodon.world/june-2023
This has been a hectic and busy month. There have been all kinds of challenges, but also a lot of good stuff! Lemmy As you might have re...
I blogged about what happened in June, and the financial overview.
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.
Can we please have a statement about your financial involvements, or lack of, with meta?
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.
Thank you. Nothing is decided yet, but because of moderation limitations on Lemmy and the fact people can't block domains for their account, I would say chances are we would defederate as soon as they do federate with Lemmy. For Mastodon these 2 arguments aren't valid so decision might be different.
Totally understandable. I thought the admin response post laid that all out very clearly. I think a lot of users probably only skimmed it/didn't read it, or were too influenced by their emotional state to have a more objective interpretation.
I think a lot of the users here have such strong emotions because of coming here from reddit, and feeling like they've found a new home they like even better, but view the possibility of Threads federation as a threat to their new space.
When there's strong emotions tied to something, it's easy for people to lose rationality and slip into emotional reasoning instead of logical reasoning. That's when a normally well-adjusted person will start insulting, threatening, acting irrationally. That is, if you subscribe to the person-brain model.
The scene in Bad Grampa with the penguin guy is a great example of someone who has lost rationality. He acts in bizarre ways that he otherwise never would have. You can see that he's rational in how he first starts interacting with Knoxville, but his rationality is eroded as he becomes more upset by Knoxville's responses.
This kind of response happens with simple discourse online all the time, and it's so unhealthy... I think it's just such an emotionally charged topic for some users that they pass their threshold for rationality very quickly.
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I think many users of reddit did not have a good opinion of Meta prior to any Reddit migration. And despite the dislike for Reddit now it is still a site where using it you know you are not going to be directly exposed to Meta or in direct partnership with them. At best it's people reuploading Meta content but not direct access to Meta services. And I don't think Meta is forcing Reddit to sign NDAs to talk to them either.
So Reddit for all its criticisms is still a Meta free place. So leaving Reddit then running into the hands of a partnered Meta instance can be an off putting prospect. If people had to choose between using a Meta affiliated instance or reddit I think many would prefer to go back to reddit.
I think people against it want more degrees of separation from Meta where separate accounts are needed to utilize their services. It's not like there isn't over a decade of Meta's track record to look at or even more recent examples like theit app requirements and permissions to use threads that raises red flags and makes people not want to use them even if it is indirectly through a fediverse alternative.
The transparency is much appreciated! Thank you and the whole admin/moderation team for everything you are doing to make lemmy.world a success.
Where can one donate? I used to pay for Reddit premium to get rid of ads but I un subbed. I could def pitch in if there was a sub model somewhere.
If you go to to the front page and open the side bar there are links to both Patreon and Open Collective. They're shared with Mastodon.world still, since they are run by the same person.
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.
Naturally, but that's sort of the magic of community-run initiatives. People give because they want to contribute, because it's about making something together, and not about being exploited.
It's just amazing what people can do when the central goal isn't for like 2 people to become billionaires at the end of the day.
Would you be able to give a further breakdown of the Lemmy associated costs?
I'm really curious to know what the current operational costs are for a Lemmy server. I was hoping to be able to do some very rough math to calculate monthly cost per user, but with these current numbers I have to include users from Mastodon and Calckey.
The Lemmy server is about 180 EUR/mo and the e-mail cost was around 70 EUR for Lemmy, because of the many new signups which require a few mails per user.
Itβs so helpful to see the costs and the raise from donations each month.
Obviously thereβs probably a spike associated with people coming from Reddit in traffic and in donations but I think itβs going to be important to keep track of these trends to make sure the team can build a reserve of funds to keep .worldβs prospects nice and healthy.
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.
I was thinking many Lemmy-only users would want their donations earmarked, but if many of the costs are shared that makes it more complicated.
Better clarification and branding sounds like a good step then, I guess the page is really more like ".world on the Fediverse"
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?
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.
I think question to ask is what does Meta have to gain by joining the fediverse? They don't need to. Their strength has been their large user base who are too dependent on their services to quit, and this small population is of no interest. So then why? What could be the reason a multi billion dollar organization would join the fediverse with a history of data mining and buying out other companies to increase their influence? Is forming a partnership with them to access their user base really a great idea? Why did people run from Reddit to jump into the arms of Meta? Is Zuckerberg really that much more trusting than Spez just because he doesn't go on public tantrums and is using this open source tech? Do people want to be that connected with what Meta has to offer despite having been so adamant about deleting material from reddit and leaving behind their communities there? Is gaining influence in the space before the platform even becomes remotely mainstream friendly a strategic move on their part to stop it before it even happens?
It's been hard enough trying to reform communities after leaving reddit and then finding to yet again try to reform communities on another instance and hoping people move there may be a hurdle that leads people back to Reddit where at least it is a more separate experience from meta. It does make me glad though that slowly communities are starting to become more spread out like Android forming their own instance just in case another migration from a big place happens. But, those are some of the concerns people have had where despite the ire towards Reddit recently they are still way better than Meta. I want see this place grow as something separate from corporate entities, but if many instances start partnering with then too then aside from use of small independent instances it starts feeling pointless to replace full time for the corporate experience.
@ruud@lemmy.world I was considering setting up a Calckey instance. Is there anywhere I can read more about this name change and new release? They only have two blog posts and neither cover this. I'm not already in the Mastodon/Calckey ecosystem so I don't know where to look for information
That's a great write up. I really appreciate all the time and diligence you and the team are putting into the instance. I also appreciate your patience, both with those of us new to Lemmy as well as your outlook on what might (or might not) happen in the future.
Being transparent to your community by giving your opinions about thread and giving the total cost of running an instance is impressive to me. Good job to the lemmy.world team
Awesome!! Glad to see things are going nicely. Also the hosting costs are less than I expected! Thatβs pretty neat! Looking forward to seeing everything grow! Youβll have my donations for as long as I am able to keep donating. Love the transparency and youβre doing a great job!