A library is paid though.
Donate to your instance, and decentralize the Fediverse.
Do you mean by taxes?
Where i come from you can go there and read for free, but if you want to borrow stuff you need to have a card which is paid my an abo.
And they will also get money by the city likely
In my city/county, you get a free card if you can prove you live here (show something with your address) Our system will also do fundraisers to supplement the budget from taxes. We almost lost some libraries a gew years ago, but voters remade the local government and they are safer now.
That’s sucks.
In my country I’m pretty sure library cards are always free. The card has to be collected in person though.
Welcome to Germany! Fucking hell here
NYC libraries are free, but asshole conservatives (but I repeat myself) don’t want to fund them.
It’s not even expensive. A single euro monthly per user is more then enough to keep instances running
The problem is that micro-payments are a pain in the ass. On Liberapay I often pay people 2 years in advance which is then pretty much
I’m not suggesting to pay one euro each month, I’m suggesting that you treat your lemmy instance as a 12 euro per year subscription. Compared to literally every other service it is basically free.
Hosting is not free.
neither is running a library
No but Lemmy is not publicly funded so people should send them a few bucks every now and then.
People should tip their servers, what they can afford.
It’s worth it
No one said it was?
- Of course, people should donate to make Lemmy sustainable.
- I recognize that this is true of any website that is not enshitified or, more broadly, is designed to maximize profits. Websites made with libre software are the public libraries of the internet!
“You mean it just exists so people can share shitposts and memes? No engagement goals to please advertisers and shareholders?”
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see if it pays off.
(Self aware double entendre in that statement)
You do need to donate
I agree! I donate so that Lemmy is sustainable and so that others who can’t donate have access to Lemmy for free.
Well no, otherwise it wouldn’t be a donation
We need tax money
God no
Don’t know where I read it, but I also like this metaphorical comparison:
Traditional social media is like a shop, except the customers are advertisers and you, as a user sit on the shelves, waiting to be bought. It’s made entirely for revenue and profit, everything else is secondary. The shop will gladly show you an advertiser that pays for your attention before showing you your parent’s vacation photos or the important post from that group you follow.
A fediverse instance is like a community garden. Nobody is a product and nobody is buying anything for themselves. Instead, everyone grows the garden together. Some people took initiative and responsibility with running the garden (admins/mods) and others joined and shared the garden with them and supported the garden with funds and content.
In the fediverse garden, there is no other point than talking amongst each other and the garden is connected to other gardens that work mostly with the same principles and the gardens “cross-polinate” each other with discussions and content and through that help each other grow even more.
It’s like a public library that lets you borrow and read books from other cities’ libraries!
Yes, we have interlibrary loan.
Instant interlibrary loan!
That’s called interlibrary loan and it predates the internet by a long time.
1876 officially. Unofficially, centuries before.
I’m pretty sure most libraries also have that.
The irony of my app having (well, trying to) ads is not lost on me.
Yeah… Having ads in an app for FOSS software automatically makes it shit-tier for me. Even if they are blocked. I just really hate ads though.
I just need a place to shitpost for stress relief, I get drawn into deeper discussions but my main goal is to be as thoughtless and as dumb as possible Wheeeeeeeee
I’m paying for the hosting of my single user instance.
What does it cost to host a lemmy? Is that something you could self host?
Yeah something like the CX22 https://www.hetzner.com/cloud/ which is € 4.51 / month is enough for lemmy.
What I do instead is I host a series of services on my VPS and I pay about 20 EUR/month
- Lemmy
- Mastodon
- PeerTube
- my ruby on rails website + blog
- my old PHP website + blog
- another old PHP blog
- my sisters PHP website
- my sisters static website
- Firefox Sync server
- my bands static website
- a matrix server with some bridges
- a syncthing instance
- a TTRSS instance
- another static website
and I probably forgot some things.
Love this! Did you start out on the Fediverse or did you start on another and then move to your own?
I ask because I’ve been considering hosting my own for the family. I already have a server.
The thing holding me back is I’ve gotten my Mastodon and Lemmy accounts really nice with content and it’s daunting to think of moving/remaking accounts.
Yeah, both with Mastodon, PeerTube and Lemmy I started on my own instances. Actually not quite, I had an Mastadon account for a day somewhere before I decided that I want to use it for real and installed my own instance.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough, sans the image store. But it’s not a hard requirement unless you expect to have lots of local communities posting pictures.
Lemmy’s issue is that it’s non-trivial to deploy and oftentimes painful to upgrade.
Looking at the resource usage of mine, a tiny cheap VPS for $4/mo would be enough
Not including the time cost to manage it.
That’s exactly my point, though.
I was trying to say that the hardware cost to host it may not be expensive, but the management cost could be quite costly.
My instance (about 2-5 active users) has a running cost of about $8 NZ, on a small VPS.
Hear me out. Are we sure that European admins can’t ask for national or European funds to run a Lemmy instances?
You pay with engagement. !
Well, if you want your instance to stay up you should expect to pitch in for operating costs…
I donate 12€ a year through OpenCollective. Donate here!. That’s 12€ more than any other social media site has ever gotten out of me. Donations also support mastodon.world.
If everyone donated 12€ a year then they’d be so flush with cash that it’d make the Wikimedia Foundation look broke.
I ensure my instance stays up, by running my own :)
Can I use the printer?
I did a 1 time donation to my instance and the devs that should cover more than a few years of me watching ads.
It’s weird though because I really value the idea of supporting projects I like but I find it so hard to part with money when I am not forced. This does become easier as I become more financially stable.
I feel gross hording money at this point. I buy a lot of shit for my hobbies but I hate buying fast food and usually just buy two and give the second away as punishment for the sin.
I’m getting weird in my old age.
To be honest with myself, I am kind of the same. For the lemmy devs and lemmy.world, there are 1€ / month tiers on patreon. Its not that much but at the very least its more than nothing.