I’m not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost… So is this place entirely donation based, or what?
Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it’s basically donations… either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.
But to put into context how much money we’re talking about…
- A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you’re talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
- The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That’s not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn’t take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.
Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course… those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.
Do note, HOW they are hosting, pays into this a lot.
I have a server I host things on here locally-
256G of ram, 32 cores/64 threads. 130T of storage. Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Coral TPUs. Lots of NVMe too.
It costs 20-30$ of energy, along with internet use-costs.
Hosting, something of that scale in the cloud, would be outrageously expensive. However, here in my local home-datacenter, with redundant power, internet, and everything, its honestly not that bad.
And- I assure you, there is redundancy. My lemmy had basically no downtime AFTER getting hit by a tornado, and power to the city being out for most of the week.- > https://lemmyonline.com/post/3751
That is impressive. Nicely done.
It doesn’t.
If you are on my instance, for example, its hosted out of my own pocket.
I have a TON of spare compute resources laying around, and I am more than happy to donate them to this cause.
Edit- lets also be perfectly honest- hosting lemmy costs FAR less then it costs me to host plex for friends/family.
Worth mentioning:
- Lemmy itself is an open source software. It’s developed by a community, and was originally created by two developers. It does not make money, except from things like donations or patreon.
- Lemmy instances are run by different members of the community. Various folks have answered ways that instances could make money but may not make money in any ways.
The Lemmy project also receives grants from NLnet (funded by the European Commission), whenever they finish milestone features. According to the developers, this was their main source of funding until very recently and are now asking for more donations.
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Out of curiosity, what are you doing for hosting? I’m interested in hosting an instance, but I’m not sure what kind of hardware to throw at it.
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Wow, that’s really cheap! I should check it out now.
Nice, thank you!
That’s the best part, it doesn’t!
You’re spot on, donations, or just people (like me) doing it
out of the goodness of their heartfor various reasons (free speech, desire for control/power, curiosity, boredom, lust for gold, being born with a heart full of neutrality, etc).My server is mostly intended for me, but anyone who wants an account is welcome. My reasons are that I already run stuff on servers I have so cost is minimal vs what I would be doing anyway, I like having control over things I run (password manager, git server, etc), and based on some of the federation drama I saw in Mastodon (and has already happened here with beehaw) it’s a good idea to run your own server.
I’ve been thinking of hosting my own instance for myself, but I was wondering if you’d noticed any oddities! I’ve heard of some bugs that occur when interacting cross-instance. Also stuff about content being out of sync, which I notice currently with lemmy.ml from my current instance (lemmy.world).
I can’t say I have, but I basically only browse from my instance, so I may very well be missing out on things I could see on the instance the community is based on. I have noticed that .world and .ml are usually very slow to return results for my searches (as well as some other large instances like sh.it-just.works), and I have had trouble getting them to acknowledge my subscription (retrying a few times over a few hours or days works). I think this is basically because they are still overloaded, at least periodically. If .ml is slow to federate because it has lots of federation work to do and .world is failing to accept requests due to load that sounds like a recipe for sending of posts, comments, votes, etc. to have to retry over a period of minutes or hours, if at all.
If you are running your own instance it would marginally increase the federation load on e.g. .ml in the example above, but since the server you run isn’t overloaded you would most likely see things on your instance after .ml’s first attempt to send you the post/comment/vote/whatever. The ideal would be lots of medium sized instances that can handle the load so that there isn’t too much federation work to do (having only one user per instance would mean servers need to federate to thousands or even millions of servers, which would be a lot of work and bandwidth), but at the same time no single server would be too overload to handle the incoming messages either.
I’d like to know this as well before I take the plunge.
Also, where can I start my own server for funsies? Ive got trueNAS, unsure if I can run it from there.
I probably can’t help much when it comes to TrueNAS, all of my experience is running it on Docker in Linux. AFAIK there is no plugin/jail for it out of the box, the easiest would probably to run a Linux VM on it and follow one of the official lemmy install guides using either Ansible or Docker (compose). I am sure you could figure out a way to install it from scratch in a jail, but that is beyond my experience with BSD.
In addition to the setup of the server itself you’ll want a domain, DNS, SSL and to figure out port forwarding (assuming your TrueNAS box is at home) at a bare minimum. Someone asked a similar question earlier and you can read a slightly longer response for these things in my response to them in [email protected]. I also suggest there that a cloud provider like digitalocean or linode would probably be more reliable and easier for some things and could be done (in a way that supports at least a small instance) on a budget of <$10/mo.
If you have any questions or want a more opinionated answer as to how I would set it up let me know.
Oh and I like the suggestion for the digital providers. I currently have a local box but I’m open to anything really. Just need to dip my toes
Yeah, regardless of your choice you’ll still need to buy a domain so I would do that first. Choose something you like, and look at all the fun different TLDs out there beyond just .com. Be careful though, some of them are trying to be exclusive so can be surprisingly pricey.
If you choose to do this relatively simply in a cloud provider… you can set up the domain to use their DNS servers (usually free) which would make things easier since most of the stuff you are doing for lemmy is all in one place. From there launch an instance (I would choose one of the ones priced around $10/mo and enable backups which costs another buck or two) and point your DNS at it. Then use the official ansible install method which will get you the rest of the way there, including taking care of the gruntwork of SSL/Let’s Encrypt.
There are all sorts of different ways you could do this to make your stuff more reliable in case the machine on the cloud provider, disks, entire datacenter (it happens) has a problem, but this is reasonably robust, especially for such a low price point.|
Again, if you have any specific questions or trouble, let me know.
I will! Thanks!
Oh, one really important thing once you have Lemmy up and running is to make sure your instance is not set to open registration (have it closed or application-only), and if possible set it up to do email verification (which is a little complex since you need to set up your instance to send emails). There is a huge wave of bot signups happening. Captcha, application-based (or closed) signup and email validation were the only ways to fight back against this wave, and sadly the latest release of Lemmy removed the captcha feature as it was deemed ineffective and not friendly for accessibility reasons (e.g. vision impairments).
Thanks a bunch! I forgot to mention I have TrueNas Scale, which is debían based and supports Docker. I’ll have a read at the official docs, thanks again!
Sooo… what happened in Beehaw?
Most of the why it is explained quite well in the instance’s sidebar:
We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users. Websites with ineffective moderation allow hate speech to proliferate and contribute to the erosion of minority rights and safe spaces. Our goal with Beehaw is to demonstrate and promote a healthier environment.
Beehaw’s approach involves a fairly aggressive content curation policy for their instance. This includes defederating instances (which they have done 387 times so far). If you agree with their philosophy this isn’t a problem and is probably welcome vs a more laissez-faire attitude some instances have. They are also still very open compared to instances like Hexbear which runs Lemmy but has federation off (it looks like they are considering opening to some degree up at some point). They give two reasons for defederation in their docs:
First, if your instance houses or has a vast array of users that engage in hate speech, it gets added to that list:
We are simple with defederating: we do not allow hate speech, and we must consider our own limits when it comes to moderating. If an instance allows hateful speech or in our judgement has users who are too much for us to currently manage given the state of Lemmy, we defederate with it.
Second, some large instances (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works) have been defederated because the burden on the admins and mods given current (incredibly primitive) tooling within Lemmy for moderation is too great even though the instance as a whole is not generally in violation of their hate speech policy. This is also a reaction to issues beyond the hate speech policy such as how users engage in the communities hosted on beehaw
The choice to defederate from an instance can also be based on our inability to effectively moderate that instance’s users. As of now, only two of our defederations are on this basis (lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works), and we hope to eventually refederate with both of them.
Finally, under the “inability to effectively moderate” justification they’ve preemptively defederated from instances that (likely mistakenly) had open sign ups and have had massive (likely bot) user growth. It seems they haven’t updated their docs to reflect this decision yet, though.
Given their philosophy I think this approach makes sense, but I absolutely understand why this pisses off some people who want more of a free-speech/wild-west in the fediverse. While someone may be free to speak everyone else is free to not listen. You have no obligation to engage with those you disagree with, as much as those people may want you to.
Hope this helps.
A mix of donations for the larger instances, and some self-hosting for smaller instances. E.g., lemmy.world has a couple of links for Donations in the sidebar. Kbin got some seed money from NLnet.
The whole thing is federated, so this costs are distributed, and I’d imagine largely pro bono.
since it’s all federated it’s most likely donations and out of pocket. the real risk here is that as communities become more and more centralized, the cost to operate increases significantly (the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom). there’s a chance that these instances won’t stay around long term, i’m not sure how the lemmy code base deals with instances dropping off. does everyone lose access to all of those servers? since your account is associated with that instance do you not also lose your account and posts?
Sorry if I get a bit technical but I’ll try to explain my understanding.
Lemmy.nz has it’s own communities. When someone subscribes to a community on another instance (say, [email protected]) , the posts and community details are copied to a local version on the server. When someone from Lemmy.nz posts to the community, it goes into our local version. The server then behind the scenes is trying to keep our version in sync with the “real” one on lemmy.ml. Lemmy.ml is sending new posts and comments to lemmy.nz, and lemmy.nz is sending posts made by lemmy.nz members back to lemmy.ml, who then send them out to other servers.
If lemmy.ml suddenly disappeared, we would continue to be able to post to the community, add comments, etc, but sending those posts to other servers wouldn’t work. lemmy.ml is responsible for sending the posts to your server at lemmy.world, and so you would not see the posts made by lemmy.nz users that are no longer able to federate - however, you could still read the community as it was at the time federation stopped and with the addition of anything anyone on your own instance has added.
One exception is media. Lemmy currently does not federate media, so if someone posts a picture to a community on lemmy.ml (where the picture is uploaded to lemmy.ml), then lemmy.ml goes offline, no one will be able to see the picture (but they will still see the post).
In terms of accounts, you will lose your account. However, accounts are also federated as remote users, so when a lemmy.world user like yourself posts to lemmy.nz, your account is also copied here. Lemmy.nz users can view the account, see that you made the comment, etc. However, you cannot log in to your account and make new posts from a different server - it’s a sort of ghost account.
So long story short, you lose access to your account and any images but the posts and comments are accessible from other servers so long as they were federated with your instance prior to it shutting down. If a new instance comes online, it will not be able to get posts from a community on an instance that is no longer online.
I suspect that with time (and support) the Devs will probably introduce account-migration.
Yes, and I think that’s probably a necessity. But that doesn’t help if the server has already gone offline, you’d need notice I expect.
For sure. Some Mastodon instances follow a code that pledges 3 months notice.
I understand that you can create your same username on another server. Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Servers are independent. You can only create the same username if it’s not already taken. [email protected] and [email protected] are the same username but different servers. You don’t get [email protected] reserved just because you have [email protected], but if it’s available you can register both.
Is there a way to have that account scrape whatever data you want to back up, saved posts etc from your ‘ghost account’ or your original account on the other server?
Lemmy is pretty young and there aren’t a lot of tools. Most likely in future there will be an ability to transfer you account to another server, notifying other instances of the change. But this would require the home server to be available for approving the transfer otherwise you would have people stealing other people’s accounts.
Mastodon (a twitter-like federated site) has an option to migrate an account, but as I understand it, that’s more about moving your followers to your new account. I don’t think the posts move. This page claims there it’s a technical reason so perhaps we wouldn’t have that on Lemmy either - but Mastodon does re-direct accounts, so perhaps on Lemmy in the future your posts might still point to the old user but if someone clicks on it then it will take them to your new account.
None of this is sorted yet so ideas will probably change over time.
Hey mate. The way you explain things is very clear and especially helpful if like me you’re missing the broader strokes context of a lot of Lemmy based discussion. It’s very off topic, but I wonder if you could explain to me the drama around meta wading in to the fediverse space and also specifically people getting angry about secret meetings and NDAs? I got wind of this on posts on my local instance but they’re all discussing the issue assuming an audience that’s already ten steps deep and understands the technical basis behind everything so I was pretty lost.
Specifically, people were afraid what Meta’s entry in to this space could mean for privacy in the fediverse but I don’t really understand why it would make a difference unless you basically joined whatever this new thing Meta has brewing is. If they enter this space, do they somehow pose a privacy threat to users of instances that federate with them? I worry about that because as far as I know you can’t personally as a user defederate, as in block anything from a particular instance, you just have to hope your specific local instance does that.
Sure! I will try to keep it simple and not too long so I’ll cover some of the main stuff without too much detail.
Open: the Fediverse is open, it’s software is open source (the code is available for anyone to copy and improve on, or contribute changes back to the main software code), and any Meta platform will be proprietary (closed source). We don’t know what the code is behind Facebook and they don’t want us to know. The openness of the Fediverse is probably the core reason people are angry about NDAs and such.
Privacy: there are certainly privacy issues, but as an individual user this should be pretty much a non-issue if you don’t follow any Meta communities and don’t use a Meta account. Remember that for almost all Fediverse platforms, posts are public anyway.
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish: this phrase was coined during an anti-trust case with Microsoft in the 90s, there’s a wikipedia page about it. The important bit is this:
The strategy’s three phases are:
- Embrace: Development of software substantially compatible with a competing product, or implementing a public standard.
- Extend: Addition and promotion of features not supported by the competing product or part of the standard, creating interoperability problems for customers who try to use the “simple” standard.
- Extinguish: When extensions become a de facto standard because of their dominant market share, they marginalize competitors that do not or cannot support the new extensions.
In our context, Meta is working on step 1, developing a platform compatible with the fediverse. People worry that steps 2 and 3 will come next, basically killing the Fediverse.
Happy to answer further questions!
Thanks!
Thanks for explaining that. I learned something new.
the lemmy.world guy had to upgrade servers at least twice during the boom
It’s their fault, though. You could either throw money at it to gain more and more
power overusers, or you embrace the federation and disable new registration at a certain amount of users.the lemmy.world people are doing fine. before launching the lemmy server they were taking in significantly more than their costs in donations https://blog.mastodon.world/
I patreon $5 month to my server - startrek.website
That’s exactly what I do. But in euros.
It’s non profit by default, the very thing that social media needs.
People who run Lemmy servers do it at their own cost. That’s not to say they can’t run ads or choose other ways to become profitable. The big difference between a lemmy instance and something like Reddit is that anyone can start a new instance if the current one goes to shit. If the admins do something the users REALLY don’t like, they can migrate to another instance way more easily than switching platforms.
Reddit is counting on the effort of switching platforms being too high for lemmy to gain traction. They are wrong.
The developers do it for free, which is common in the open source community. There will always be volunteers to build the software and donors to support them.
I have wondered how migrating instances would work. Would anything come with me to a new account on a new instance or is it still similar to moving from Reddit where I’m starting over?
Mastodon has a way to migrate so it’s possible with ActivityPub. There’s an open issue for migraine instances that wasn’t closed so I assume it’s planned. I have no idea if it’s being actively worked on though.
It’s an open issue on GitHub, and was featured in the recent dev blog:
At the same time, we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.
So no, currently you can’t move. You can only create a new account on another instance, and start using that instead. At least you’re still on the same platform.
Given the popularity of the issue, I would assume it will find a solution. But given no one is assigned to it yet, we probably still have no people willing to work on it.
pulls out a pocket Gandalf who puffs an Uncle Sam in the air, pointing at YOU
Lemmy isn’t a company, it’s just the software. The devs develop it as a hobby, basically.
Your server is lemmy.world. It’s unclear how it will be funded as it gets big. If it goes under someone will start another one, though.
Actually- they are full time working on this.
The devs… have socialist tendencies(by their own admission, their words, not mine!), and are more then happy to live on peanuts and bread while building software for the better of humanity.
However, donations to the project, do pay for their basic expenses.
Wow, that’s impressive! Not many open-source developers don’t need a full-time gig.
IIRC they’re openly Marxists-Leninists.
Haha don’t need to treat socialism like a taboo, there’s more to the world than the US and laissez-faire capitalism.
I understand- I took that part from one of the dev’s bios.
they have been funded by grants from NLnet (I think from EU funds?) but I think are transitioning to donation-based.
lemmy.world is run by the same people as mastodon.world and it is already donation funded. They post financial updates on their blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/
The world’s most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it’s certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.
Right now, this is a service being provided largely by volunteers, with some help from donors. For example, the lemmy.world instance is run by the same person as mastodon.world, who has posted some information here about the costs and donations involved in running Fediverse services.
As it turns out, it’s not super expensive to run a public-facing Internet service with a few thousand users if you’re interested in doing so as a hobby activity. And a lot of folks are willing to donate to help the project along!
More generally: Over the history of the Internet, new services have often been prototyped by researchers, students, and hobbyist volunteers. These folks are expecting to spend a little money to make the service work, and usually enjoy it when people using the thing they’ve built! They usually don’t have an immediate need to monetize everything, but they often accept donations if you’re enjoying their work and want to contribute that way.
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That’s the neat part. You don’t.
I’d be surprised if the donations cover the cost of the servers. It’s pretty much run entirely on the goodwill of the server owner
Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.
A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.
Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it’s all media storage.
