Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.
I think lemmy should do what Lichess.org does, which is: Give an icon to donators/patrons. That is all, just an icon. It is surprisingly effective. For example, see this: https://lichess.org/@/thibault. The wing, before his username is the icon to which I am referring. it is visible site-wide.
I bet if we stole the idea of reddit gold and allowed people to award comments and posts, but 1. no premium membership and 2. make it clear that the money is going to help keep the service running, that would bring in a lot of revenue without harming the community.
sounds like a decent idea, but how can it scale to so many servers out there? it’s a logistical hell
If it was just built into the base software, then every instance would have the option available by default, no? And then it would just be a question of directing the money to the right place and displaying the relevant icon on the awarded post or comment.
I’m no software engineer, though, so it’s entirely possible everything I’m saying is total bollocks. Still, worth considering if we’re thinking about the long-term health of this place, IMO.
I’d rather just give them my money and have a little icon. I don’t like the idea of copying Reddit. Even the upvote/downvote thing is cullable if you ask me. The only thing Reddit-like that I enjoy is the familiar UI.
As in, some kind of “contributor” badge next to your username? That’s also definitely a good way to do it. Basically, if it makes donations visible on the community level, I think it’s a benefit.
How do you guarantee the money isn’t being used for profit?
That’s certainly a valid and important question, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to the question of how Lemmy increases its operating revenue. If I’m living minimalist but my issue is I can’t sustainably afford housing, food, and healthcare, there’s no way to solve that problem without solving the fundamental issue of me not making enough money. My impression is that that is the main question facing Lemmy at this moment, and so that’s what I was focused on.
I suspect most financial advisors would tell you that managing money is what you do when you have some.
Yeah, very true. It’s quite the catch-22.
With decentralised systems and free software we can try to evade the control of these corporations (and the profit motive), but the irl parallels to this (e.g. self-sustability) are even more difficult to pull off.