I’m engaging with dozens of servers and hundreds of creators on lemmy, and I’d like to give back to more of them. I built a tool a few years ago called subless(subless.com) which aimed to do something similar for the non-federated internet, and I’d like to make something for the Fediverse too.
Do you think donations should be distributed like content?
I threw together a survey that would really help me understand how y’all are thinking about donations. I’d really appreciate it if anyone could fill it out.
Thanks!
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There was no “I have not donated, I would not donate” option in your survey, so if your intention is to understand how people are thinking about donations I think your survey needs some work.
First of all, I think the fediverse, the good one in the future, is made of lots lots and lots of small instances.
Why?
Because FB, Reddit etc “brought” all the forums, homemade sites etc that existed before together in one place, regrouped them by helping everybody, and then when having the control, enshittifying it all to monetize it…
So for me, in the long run, sites should probably be about one thing, not like “everything”.
That said, most small specialized sites could probably run well on a shoestring budget or almost for free (I put up an old PC with a lemmy instance and except the time it’s just the electric bill I’ll pay when I don’t need heating, for example).
So should you give money to the “big” sites? Really, I don’t know, probably today yes to have the “Lemmyspace” running. To a small community if needed, yeah!
I think it’s a complex question without a good simple answer.
The tough part for me historically has been that I hit way more creators than I can donate to. Even if you break up everything into individual sites, then federate them, it’s a pain to have a ton of $5 subscriptions. So the thing OP and I worked on was a supplement - a monthly budget you set, say $20, that got split among all the creators and places you browsed each month, with places you browsed more getting a bigger cut. This seems like not a perfect answer, but maybe a good first approximation for a federated net, which is why we’re asking around to whether communities see a fit for what their goals are.
Hah yeah I understand. But it’s also where I’m not agreeing with you on a more “political” level.
I see the lemmyverse (or basically the internet, I’m old) as a way of sharing information, not as a way of earning money.
For me you’d donate to make a sub, a community or an instance staying alive, not for ‘content creation’. You’re helping a space where people exchange whatever they do. I’m maybe wrong here but I feel that if content creators will earn money, it’s the open bar for publicity, doom scrolling algorithms and everything else we’ve seen the last ten years.
I love some of the “free” stuff on the internet, like I re-read Girl Genius and I’ll probably buy more stuff from them because they are so awesome (science & romance!).
So I’m up for debate ofc.
If we want to leave ad tracking hell, we need to be willing to put up some expenses or reimagine Federation to be at the user level instead of the instance level.
I guess it depends on what you want?
Is it some sort of ‘get together and share stuff’ thing or a ‘earn a living from content creation’ ?
I mean you can spin up a small instance for 10€ a month if it’s the former…
One of the big problems now is the amount of space needed to host media. It’s gonna be a limiting factor quick.
Weell yeah maybe. But I just got myself a spare 3TB drive for like 30€ so I can backup my Lemmy who’s living on a 4TB drive. Will it be enough? For some time I sure do think so.
You reinvented Flattr?
Definitely the same concept, but our implementation didn’t require a browser plugin, and we worked on phones!
There’s been a lot of attempts at micropayment solutions, a ton of which we cribbed lessons from for sure. E.g., that’s why we didn’t try the “charge a little bit from a wallet at a time” approach, which has failed a ton of times because it’s exhausting to browse the Internet that way.
Ok, cool, I signed up for a test right now, I’m not sure though how many creators which I visit already have any account there, but we’ll fgure it out over time.
Oh wow, thanks! So, big question for us, if you’re down: if we also split your payment up along the different lemmy servers your account interacted with each month, would you see that as a benefit?
Yes, because I’m kind of us using their infrastructure for my benefits.
And Brave, but without crypto scams.
I’m not even really sure in what context you would consider a donation as being appropriate.
I contribute because I want to be helpful, and I feel like I am providing value. I do this for free, with no expectation of return. I don’t need to spend money to push value into the system.
Thanks for the response!
A buddy of OP here who also worked on subless, for context. From my perspective, already lemmy.world publishes “how to donate” text, as do other servers, so the servers are kind of step one. Then there’s the actual developers writing the software behind them. After that, there’s creators that pop up in Fediverse communities who post their patreon links, ko-fi, etc. These are all people doing serious work that I’d like to support, and is in some cases more than you can just kind of do in your free time. So that’s where the drive comes from, for me.
So what are you intending to offer that people aren’t already able to do? A link to a patreon, ko-fi, etc. already exists on creator’s pages.
Great question! The reason for this poll is to ask if people feel that’s enough.
On a personal level, it’s not - as mentioned above, I hit more services and people I’d like to support than it’s reasonable to do a patreon/ko-fi for each, and it ends up being partially random chance on who gets support. But I’m curious if that’s a problem for other people’s on the Fediverse, and what they think about it if so - or if there are other problems we’re not even tracking on.
More loosely, the concept we’re playing with looks at the servers you interacted with and splits your monthly budget among them automatically, dropping the manual “will I subscribe to this server’s patreon?” or “will I make a donation today?” steps needed right now. But as far we know right now, that’s just solving me and Punty’s problem - it’d be cool to know other people saw this problem too.
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I’ve noticed some cool original contributions in, for example
https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting https://lemmy.world/c/ergomechkeyboards https://lemmy.world/c/digitalart https://lemmy.world/c/homeimprovement
There are also lots of active spaces on mastodon. I also have some hope that as the fediverse grows, it will bring over some more niche creative communities from twitter, reddit, etc.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !3dprinting@lemmy.world, !ergomechkeyboards@lemmy.world, !digitalart@lemmy.world, !homeimprovement@lemmy.world
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I think that each magazine should have a related store where people can sell goods that are related to the content threads and the people that are running the servers would get a cut of the proceeds.
You can even use the new instant bank transfer system in America to pay for it and cut MasterCard and Visa out of the process.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/economy/fednow-launch-consumer-guide/index.html
I feel like that would be a good way to both fund the fediverse and to sell goods and services, however we should also have strict policies about not advertising the stuff you have for sale and instead remind people from time to time that if they have an idea for Merch or have some merch they want to buy that’s related they can go to the store page for this magazine.
