I suspect reddit's reported unprofitability isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Any "good" corporation is supposed to be "unprofitable", i.e. investing all their income into future growth.
And if you believe that the money you invest in your business will outperform usual loan interest rates, then it also makes sense to take out loans for even more growth, since then loan interests will be paid by future profits that compounds from the growth you get by taking out the loan.
Of course, usually that doesn't work, so the CEOs and whoever tries to cash out before the eventual crash.
Given that lemmy is an OSS project and decentralized, it draws a lot of people with knowledge and resources. You could easily host your own instance for your friends, to have them connect to other instances. And i think there are enough people in these communities that have some left over server resources to host their own instances.
I got an old server from work sitting around at home doing nothing. Seriously thinking about hosting my own instance on it
ads and trackers. people worry about privacy like they r handling CIA data and all they have on their phones is videos of cats and golden retrievers
I just don't like to be manipulated to buy shit. The experience of anything with adds is infinity worse.
Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
- a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
- not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
The good thing is: Free development can an does happen (see Linux!). Hosting seems to be the main issue. An ideal solution would be each instance having a capacity limiter, which automatically redirects a % of content to other instances if it becomes to much. Is this possible?
Development of Linux is in large parts paid for by big corporations. Just look at the @reddit.com, @ibm.com, etc. email addresses of the commiters. Development is expensive and developers working full-time have to eat too. You can only go so far with only volunteers. It can work, but is not guaranteed to be sustainable.
At some point you need to have dedicated developers working on the code-base, because scale (more users) grows demand (of features).
a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
Can you elaborate? I have the impression, that we need to think more deeply about how the donations should be distributed. E.g. a users fund are donated proportional to their subscribed Communities? I think it's difficult, as people's time spent on a community doesn't necessarily mean it's proportionally valuable. I've had a few subreddits which I used rarely but we're quite important to me.
Each instance is free to field their own donation drives for their running cost. They even can display advertisements if they feel like it. There is no "one size fits all" here, and there shouldn't.
Each instance is potentially in a different jurisdiction, making it hard to transfer money, etc.
Not only that, but I think having funds centrally collected and then distributed is a particularly bad idea. It comes with too much opportunities for bad blood. Money and friendship don't mix.
The only unifying constant of the network is the software that runs it. This though needs to be improved in various areas, for which centrally collected funds would be ideal, as every instance will benefit from it. No operator of any instance would have a disadvantage from advertising the central donation drive. They would benefit from it by having better software in the end.
A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.
I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they'll give up because the bigger instances are closed. Someone's gotta pay for it, and it's going to cost more than a Netflix subscription. Servers aren't cheap.
This also ignores that the system isn't horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive
I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.
(This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don't think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.
This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive
Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don't understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.
What does ‘horizontally scalable’ mean here? I haven’t come across that before.
This is what I think, but if anyone understands it differently please correct me.
Vertical scalability refers to scaling within a single instance. More users join and they post more content, increasing the amount of disk space needed to hold that memory, network bandwidth to handle many users downloading comments and images at once, and processing power.
Horizontal scaling refers to the lemmyverse growing because of the addition of new instances. The problem in this form of scaling is due to the resources that an instance has to use due to its interactions with other instances. So, you may create a small instance without a lot of users, but the instance might still need a lot of resources if it attempts to retrieve a lot of information (posts, comments, user information, etc) from the other larger instances. For example, at some point a community in lemmy.ml might be so popular that subscribing to that community from a small instance would be too much of a burden on the smaller instance because of the amount of memory required to save the constant stream of new posts. The horizontal scaling is a problem when the lemmyverse becomes so large that a machine with only a small amount of resources is no longer able to be part of the lemmyverse because its memory gets filled up in a few hours or days.
I don't believe this is how it works though.
Let's say your tiny 3 person instance is connected to a big one. I believe it only pulls in content from the communities somebody from the small instance is subscribed too. Correct me if I'm wrong.
That's what I've gathered, but I don't believe there's a way for instance owners to limit what's fetched - a user crafts the query and the server does the needful.
I imagine this could amount to a denial of service attack of sorts, if some high-churn communities are imported into tiny instances. How bad that could be, I have no idea - I'm speaking pretty theoretically, here. Text is tiny, after all, so it's probably not much of a concern, since most of the media is actually handled elsewhere...
I'm not a web developer. I'm sort of a sysadmin so i have some experiences maintaining machines for web apps for other people. And you are right...text will not create massive amounts of data. But a lot of tiny transactions can bring down machines surprisingly fast even if the total amount of data is relatively small.
I guess we are here to experience it first hand. I don't think anybody...not even the developers have a clear idea of how well this will scale. There is only one way to find out lol
By not asking the same question every single day.
edit: misposted comment - see bizarre explanation below (and it's not just me)
- westworld - lovely visuals
- alias - excellent theme music
- bojack horseman
What lol
I composed that comment in another thread, tabbed away, and when I tabbed back the pending comment was pasted into this thread that I wasn't even reading. Hit POST before I noticed it. 2nd time that's happened this morning.
You know you can delete comments right?