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.
People should also remember that it costs money for these servers to exist. So if you enjoy using it, try to support the service by donating to your instance, contributing to open source projects, spreading the gospel, etc.
Couldn’t agree more, we need to continue to attract the kind of people who would really be able to help grow this kind of community, so if you have friends you think would like this, try talking to them.
Drop a couple bucks into support the admins and servers - think about streaming services you pay for and use less. $5-10/month to donate to a service you are using daily is pretty cheap considering.
I see a lot of people willing to support the servers, but little conversation on how to support the admins. I support a living (and competitive) wage for folks, and don’t think instance admins should be doing this work for free. If you set up your own tiny instance for your family, sure, I bet you won’t be charging your family for it, but a huge instance with constant needs and a bunch of strangers is a totally different thing. Just donating toward server costs does not allow admins to pay their personal bills, while they put in hours of work to keep this place going. So, I appreciate you for including “admins” in the support needs!
I know a lot of people hate it but I wonder if crypto/digital donation would work. All you would need is a separate wallet setup to pay the host every month. Maybe even have a graph/chart showing how much is in the wallet vs how much the monthly bill is.
I like this for the transparency but crypto is an open ledger, anyone can see the balance of any address at any time as well as see where the addresses where money was sent. Plenty of hosts now take crypto and most larger exchanges are tagged on explorers for btc, ltc, etc. That makes it easier for the public to keep an audit on what’s going on.
I know you can see how much is in a wallet, I would prefer a visualization of amount in the wallet vs how much the server costs.
I agree and said exactly that. It would show intent to be transparent if that was setup. My point is that even without that we can still keep an eye on things.
One problem with cryptocurrency is that instead of being coupled with mainstream banks (where workers get their pay deposited) it is instead coupled with speculative assets employed by criminals. As such, choosing to work on accepting cryptocurrency instead of working on accepting real-money donations ties the service to a crime economy instead of a mainstream economy.
Good thing criminals never use cash, otherwise you could call the world economy criminal.
HSBC helping to launder money at the teller window with custom boxes must have been a fever dream.
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So you are saying that HSBC getting caught helping launder cartel money at the teller is fake news?
USD Is still the preferred currency of criminals across the world and even more so they use assets like paintings to facilitate non traceable payment and smuggle extremely large dollar amounts. They also use art work to launder money.
I’d suggest you pull your head out of your ass and get on the crypto train because it’s leaving you behind. Look at btc, ltc, dash and others.
To add. USD hasn’t been backed by a real asset in nearly a century. It was once backed by gold but now the only thing backing it is full faith in the USA. At the moment that means something, it might not always.
You need to educate yourself on this stuff because you sound like a moron.
The difference is that the entire world economy would need to collapse for the US dollar to be worthless. Crypto can become worthless because some 22-year-old video game addict steals everyone’s deposit.
The USD, just like any other fiat currency, is backed by the trustworthiness of its central bank and the economic base of the currency area.
In other words: Euros are backed by the fact that if you’re in Italy and have a Euro, you can exchange it for an espresso. You can trust the ECB that it will do its darnest to keep prices stable, and you can trust Italians to continue making espresso, which means that the Euro indeed is a hard currency.
I said I’d be willing to pay up to 5/mo for baconreader, this should be no different… Once I figure out the instance that really matters to me.
Yeah, I used to pay $3/month for Apollo - would be very happy to donate that to lemmy server admins instead. My issue is that I don’t know what instance(s) to donate to given that I’m absorbing content from quite a few different instances at the moment. One of the issues with decentralisation is that I don’t really know who deserves my financial support the most! Maybe I’ll just donate to my home instance.
Not another subscription /s
Hey! at least we have unlimited reads and writes, LOL
I’m dirt poor but I’ve donated to Wikipedia at least three times now. I use that website so often, it’s changed my life.
I have them some money after I graduated college. I had used them so much it felt right to give back a bit.
They’re not a perfect org bit they’re very much an org I’d prefer to continue to exist
Good for you. I like to think that every little helps.
You’ve inspired me to be honest. I really didn’t use much of Wikipedia in high school or university but I’ve definitely fallen down the wiki-hole very many times and leanred things that there’s no way I’d have learned if not for the convenience. Gonna donate them a fiver now; it ain’t much, but it’s honest work.
I’m glad to hear that! I’m the same, I don’t recall using it for school or uni, but I can’t begin to imagine how many random pages I’ve looked up as an adult. If it disappeared tomorrow I’d be gutted.
Beehaw has a periodic financial update. It would be great if each instance had a similar kind of update so that we can understand what is needed and where to help.
That gives me an idea!
I like it, and it represents the spirit of the fediverse well, but power does cost money. It seems like you want to run a small hands off instance, which is great, but if it starts to grow you might want to keep that in mind.
One nice thing about using parts scavenged from roadside signs is they’re incredibly power efficient. If everything was pulling its full power, I think I’d be pulling 100W maximum, and they don’t run like that.
Fair enough! What exactly did you find on the side of the road that actually worked? It’s a fun idea for lots of servers.
Fanless commercial grade sign PCs are fairly available on the second hand market, relatively inexpensive, and they’re not super high powered, but they’re good enough for small instances of stuff.
Cool stuff! Thanks.
@[email protected] Something for us as well maybe?
contributing to open source projects
You need to be careful with this point, because it becomes addictive.
It’s 4AM and I just submitted a PR to the Liftoff app repo.
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to. The beauty of community projects and free software. I enjoy being a freeloader, thanks very much. I will contribute by making this an active project with my posts.
Eh, I like free software the same way I like free beer - I don’t ever have to pay for it, and no one can compel me to.
Right, and no one is even attempting to compel you to. In my opinion, this is one of those “within your means” kind of thing. If you went to your friends house, hung out, and drank his beer every weekend, month after month, his reaction might depend on your ability to contribute. If he knew you struggled to make ends meet, he might be just fine with it, especially if you tried to help out in other ways. He you make more money than he does, and he was the one scraping by, he might get resentful. Either way, he can’t compel you, but one is kind of shitty.
Some of us have more ability to financially support than others, and that’s fine. Last night I made a donation to the developers and another to my instance admins. I’m thinking about making that automatic monthly, but we’ll see. The point is, I think it’s fine if this is a bit socialistic, with some paying a lot, some paying a little, and others not paying at all, as long as the community is able to thrive. By the same token, some instance owners will likely consider it a hobby and not need/want any donations, while some others won’t be able to support growth without them.
Well, I will sound immensely selfish, and maybe it’s because I’ve been so used to “free everything” on the Internet, but I will never pay for an online service ever. I pirate all my books, all my TV shows, and use scripts and archive.is to read online newspapers and magazines for free. Life costs so much money already, I will never ever feel bothered to actually donate to an online service or free software.
If Lemmy.world goes down due to lack of funds, no problem from me. I’ll join a different instance and carry on. Or go back to Reddit.
I’ll happily admit to being a loafer on the Internet. I expect little from my services so long as I don’t have to pay shit for it.
I will never pay for an online service ever
I disagree with this attitude, but you’re for sure not alone. If everyone was like that, we just wouldn’t have a lot of things we do now.
When our boys were young and torrents and ad blockers were new, I tried to get them to understand that, while not everything is about money, people generally don’t invest huge amounts of their own time and money into things that they aren’t getting paid for. If everyone started using ad blockers, sites would close down or move to a subscription model because ads are what paid for content. If everyone stole their music, some bands might just hang it up or put less focus on making new music, etc.
And here we are: lots of publications have moved behind paywalls because they weren’t getting much ad revenue anymore, many have started putting out content that’s just regurgitated crap from Twitter and Reddit because they can’t afford journalists, and some have just gone under. Bands spend a lot more time touring because it’s harder to steal a concert so they make more money doing that than putting out albums (though the Spotify model has changed some things). People are all about stealing content and thinking they should get everything for free, but it really is selfish and unrealistic.
Here’s the thing: the rest of life (rent, food, retirement etc.) cost so much already that anything I can get for free or don’t have to pay for in some way I will make that choice to pirate or not pay. If capitalism wasn’t breathing down my neck with all this crazy inflation in food costs, rent increases, student loan repayments, etc., perhaps I would be more amenable to paying for newspapers and online services and all that nice to have stuff. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
I will sound immensely selfish
You do sound immensely selfish.
Why comment this
To boost active user count on Lemmy.
At least you have the self awareness that you are a selfish asshole, so that’s something I guess?
Rent and food come first for me. Online services are fungible. Like if it’s free to use or free to take, I’ll take advantage. We all have to eat first and some of us don’t earn enough money to donate to a free project. Donations are a luxury to me.
Don’t judge, 99% of the people using Lemmy and its various instances will never donate. We contribute happily through our posts.
I don’t think you know what fungible means.
I understand this position - I used to be of the “it’s the internet, steal anything that isn’t nailed down” mentality too.
And I still have a lot of that, to be fair. But COVID taught me a general lesson that I’ve been trying to take to heart: if you want nice things that cost money to function to keep existing, at some point people are going to need to chip in. My town lost a ton of good local businesses to the pandemic, and many others got dangerously close to closing. I don’t go out and support every local business, but shit I care about (my local independent movie theatre, live music venues, etc.) gets the amount of money I’m willing to contribute.
If people don’t do this, nice things either disappear or become less nice in an effort to secure funding by alternate means.
You’re welcome not to - the means exist where you don’t have to - but think about the declining quality of some of the stuff you enjoy and why that might be the case.
This might not compel you to, but the only way to keep Lemmy from turning into Reddit 2 is by donating so they don’t have to seek out investors. We all have to do what we can to help out - that said, by posting you are creating content for the website. That’s not nothing.
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Well put. Take my lemmy lemon🍋
are we lemoning now?
Stop trying to make lemoning happen. It’s not going to happen!
It’s gonna be a real lemon party!
Just don’t invite the whores, I hear they steal lemons…
It’s a travesty that this doesn’t have more upvotes
Lemmy Lemon is an amazing concept, plz make real 🙏
what is it?
No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative… It gets the people going!
I’m starting to work out a concept for funding servers a little differently. Since the Fediverse / Lemmyverse is not just one server admin, but a bunch of them, I want to run an experiment to see if it’s feasible to make a subscriber based, or even activity-based calculation of how to dice up each user’s donation.
It’ll all be just a proof-of-concept at first, maybe it works and it’s legally possible too (biiig if), then it could work something like a FOSS funding system.
It’s just in documentation phase now, figuring out what would be a proper algorithm and such, but if you’re wiling to think along (or talk me out of it), please send a dm.
Edit: woah there, my app was going haywire. I removed the duplicates
Can you explain how this would work a bit? I’m not familiar with the concept, but wondering if it means that funding would pool through a single system and be distributed across different instances?
Hello, I made a community for it, /c/lemmyfund, feel free to join there! I’ve written some stuff down on GitHub as well, a link is in the community.
So is the idea that an individual user makes a donation of an amount of their choosing, and the donation goes to instance admins based in some way on which communities they are interacting with?
Hello, so, yeah, that’s the gist of it.
You sign up, and on the cut-off date the system should at first check what instances you’re part of and divvy up the shares, and later on we can dig down and slice up parts in more detail.
I’ve made a community for it, /c/lemmyfund, feel free to join there!
I purchased Apollo and also subscribed to Reddit premium as I was a heavy user and wanted to contribute my fair share. Happy to until…of course. Looks like a much better value here - an actual community. Worth my money (like Wiki too!)
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This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you’re not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
kick em a few bucks, be their customer.
Better yet, be their partner.
That’s a bit much, I’m not looking to get into a relationship here. /s
What about… comrade?
You’re right, what am I talking about. Updates relationship status: In a Federationship
LOL
This is important to note, we’re not the customers nor the product for now.
Instances need to be sustainable as to not look for other potential types of funding.
It’s time for social media where you are the customer. That’s what I would like, and I am willing to pay for it if the costs are reasonable. I thing that starts with public accounting. Like a condo association. I think some instances have started doing this.
Or they can decide to shut down the instance. If you have the means to do so, consider donating to your friendly neighborhood host. Hosting an instance isn’t free.
Yes, and this will foster large instances, similarly to the Mastodon project, which means a concentration of power, which means easy targets for billionaires.
This is similar to presidential regimes: they can be useful temporarily in a “move fast, break things” motto (see France trying to be perceived as a “winner” of the Second World war after having constitutionally given the full powers to the Pétain Marshall, who then decided to collaborate with Nazis) but they’re much easier to corrupt and they make it much easier to say, privatize every public service than a parliamentary one.
You don’t want power concentration or the billionaires will come for you.
One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.
Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.
I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.
It’s the kind of thing that’s easy to start and hard to continue. Time will tell, but I hope we can develop the kind of community values here that will grow with scale, rather than shrink
Nope. You’re the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.
Good to see it making a comeback.
USER
WARNING: INCOMING GAME
The only way to win is not to play
I sincerely hope you’re right about that comeback!
This is open source. We are neither products nor customers - we are all test subjects.
That’s a little reductive… Lemmy Admins are users as well. And any bug reports or feedback you provide is implemented to improve Lemmy, which we all benefit from.
It was a joke :)
Lemmy wouldn’t be a Reddit alternative if it didn’t have some whooshing in it.
To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:
“A beginning is a very delicate time.”
What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive “consumers” we’ve all been corporately groomed to be.
I think more instances are the answer because this activity can’t be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc
This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don’t know what that looks like.
I’m not a developer of any sort, but I’m super interested if a “folding at home” style option is doable. I can’t front the costs for a whole server for an instance, but I’m totally willing to contribute some resources from my pc to avoid falling into the same reddit trap. If we all did it as users I think that would avoid the centralization problem as well as distribute costs effectively.
Unfortunately, there is no way to distribute the work in that way. the @Home projects worked because it could give your computer a hard problem to work on with little traffic to and from the server.
no, unfortunately, the best way for all of us to contribute in those smallest of ways is to run an instance at home. That way, whatever amount of “thinking” (CPU) thats done by Lemmy server would normally have to do, you can do. Its not a lot of processing (CPU) though (compared to @Home), but its a lot of traffic
By having an instance with a single user you’re not actually helping, but making it worse.
Hmm, distributed computing Lemmy instance, that’s an interesting idea.
Storage of the database might be complicated, especially as user submissions increase. You might be able to break up the data and spread it across multiple hosts, but keeping it all synchronized as users add information would be complicated and probably have more lag time than the current issues sharing posts and comments across instances.
Can a Lemmy instance be effectively abstracted from the host server? Probably worth exploring.
Yes, by running your own Lemmy server :P
Well, I mean abstracted in a way that would allow one instance of the Lemmy server software to run coherently on a distributed VM running on top of multiple physical host servers spread around the internet.
We do this sort of thing now in large datacenters, with cloud apps running on VMs that are abstracted from the actual server hardware. If one server goes offline it doesn’t affect the operation of the VM because it’s running across many physical servers and the hypervisor can flexibly shift the software operations to whichever hardware is available.
Is there a way to mirror an instance to spread the overhead and provide redundancy while still being admined and moderated by the same group of people as the original instance?
My immediate reaction is that mirroring would probably increase the overhead because of the additional message traffic needed to keep the mirrors in sync, but that’s more a feeling than an informed opinion.
Adding to your point on responsibility: Call out people who insult others in their comments. There should be no place where insults are ok.
Lets see what the future brings. As long as the user count is low there isn’t much of a problem, but if instances suddenly have millions of users, it will get expensive for admins to run the service. If too few people donate (what is usually the case), admins are forced to search for other ways to finance the infrastructure. The other point is AI, wheter you like it or not, if Lemmy is big enough, the content (conversations etc.) will be used to train LLMs. Also, the content will certainly be interesting for advertisers to learn user preferences. The difficulty comes with scale.
So, in theory, of we keep the individual instances manageably small and spread everyone across multiple instances we should be sustainable. As it generally doesn’t matter which instance you’re on so long as its federated with the community at-large we could keep the instance servers affordable for the admins and users that are able to financially contribute.
Yes, that would be the best. But as we have seen, users are drawn to the instances with the most users :/
Not drawn, they’re actively sent there by people they trust (app creators, subreddit mods or fellow users).
Not really? If would be the same but called “not enough instances” if i understand correctly.
This idea that the poster isn’t the “customer” isn’t really helping matters. The whole point of these communities is to facilitate communication, and if there are bugs and feature requests interfering with that process, that’s something to be taken seriously. Instead, we have a UI that badly needs improvements and not enough interest to fix them.
“Doing awesome things” comes at the cost of time and effort. It doesn’t just happen.
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and that’s ok for a change
It’s like hanging out at a friend’s house. Follow their rules.
And be nice.
And take off your shoes.
and try to leave it better than you found it
Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.
“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.
I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)
What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”
I’ve donated to wikipedia before because I feel its valuable to me for all the information it gives.
I might donate to lemmy if i feel its valuable to me for information or discussions
I think the part that’s missing is that this advice is related to companies, not in general. If the company is making a profit, and not asking you to pay, where is the money coming from?
The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.
The full original quote was.
The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?
That is all I have to add.
So many boomers think “the customer is always right” means the service provider is required to give you white glove treatment when the real meaning is that the service provider is not allowed to tell the customer theyre wrong to like plaid and paisley together
Not even not allowed really, it’s just a dumb thing to do if you want to make a sale in most instances
I’ve never heard the full quote before, I guess. Where does it come from?
This has been commonly spread around Reddit for a while, and is completely made up.
The full original quote was “The customer is always right.” This was pushed by some retailers as a way of setting the standard of how to treat customers.
Like most oversimplified phrases, it can’t be used as a blanket policy, because customers take advantage of it. “in matters of taste” is a nice way to try to correct the phrase in response, but it was never the “original” and it does no favors to revise history to cover up the blunder.
I think I remember reading that, and the author provided clarification a year later, correcting that it doesn’t hold true with dishonest customers!
And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.
It truly does remind me of the wide-spread forum days, but with the bells and whistles that comes from connectivity across the board.
