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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I gave 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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!
“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?
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.
“Do awesome things”
BEANS
“Do things awesome”
BEANS
4.34K updoots is no joke after all
Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.
When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.
When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.
No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes – and we can move.
Wikipedia’s innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There’s always someone “wrong on the internet” somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.
Reddit seemed incrementally better than most – up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.
Well put. Take my lemmy lemon🍋
are we lemoning now?
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
Stop trying to make lemoning happen. It’s not going to happen!
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 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!)
People always forget the last part of the quote: “The customer is always right in matters of taste.”
</pedantic> ;-)
I like this but I cannot find a reputable source to back this quote. Do you have one by any chance?
I’ve heard: “the customer is always right, until you get their money.”
I honestly think more instances should support some sort of donation or explicit customer model. Running such things is expensive, and sourcing money when things are ran for free is hard, so these kinds of platforms tend to be ran out of pocket, which makes them somewhat volatile. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of big platforms and instead should build something sustainable from the get go.
I think lemmy should do what Lichess.org does, which is: Give an icon to donators/patrons. That is all, just an icon. It is surprisingly effective. For example, see this: https://lichess.org/@/thibault. The wing, before his username is the icon to which I am referring. it is visible site-wide.
I bet if we stole the idea of reddit gold and allowed people to award comments and posts, but 1. no premium membership and 2. make it clear that the money is going to help keep the service running, that would bring in a lot of revenue without harming the community.
How do you guarantee the money isn’t being used for profit?
That’s certainly a valid and important question, but I’m not sure how relevant it is to the question of how Lemmy increases its operating revenue. If I’m living minimalist but my issue is I can’t sustainably afford housing, food, and healthcare, there’s no way to solve that problem without solving the fundamental issue of me not making enough money. My impression is that that is the main question facing Lemmy at this moment, and so that’s what I was focused on.
I suspect most financial advisors would tell you that managing money is what you do when you have some.
Yeah, very true. It’s quite the catch-22.
With decentralised systems and free software we can try to evade the control of these corporations (and the profit motive), but the irl parallels to this (e.g. self-sustability) are even more difficult to pull off.
sounds like a decent idea, but how can it scale to so many servers out there? it’s a logistical hell
If it was just built into the base software, then every instance would have the option available by default, no? And then it would just be a question of directing the money to the right place and displaying the relevant icon on the awarded post or comment.
I’m no software engineer, though, so it’s entirely possible everything I’m saying is total bollocks. Still, worth considering if we’re thinking about the long-term health of this place, IMO.
I’d rather just give them my money and have a little icon. I don’t like the idea of copying Reddit. Even the upvote/downvote thing is cullable if you ask me. The only thing Reddit-like that I enjoy is the familiar UI.
As in, some kind of “contributor” badge next to your username? That’s also definitely a good way to do it. Basically, if it makes donations visible on the community level, I think it’s a benefit.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
That’s not really the saying, it’s what everyone thinks the saying is, especially Karen’s, but it isn’t.
The saying is “the customer is always right, about the price”. I.e. that value of a product is equal to what people are prepared to pay for the product, not what you’d like them to pay, as a business owner.
It has nothing to do with businesses have to appease customers, regardless of whether they’re being ridiculous or sensible.
I remember seeing “the customer is always right in matters of taste” on Reddit many times, but I can’t find any real sources now. Maybe that was just an artifact of the echo chamber.
We’re all guests in an apartment building with an open door policy in a village of apartment buildings.
Help out your building owners with the utility costs if ya can, design some cool apartments for others to experience and visit, but most importantly: take care of your neighbors and commune with each other to grow a stronger community
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
While I agree and love the idea, it’s going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:
- It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
- The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
I’m honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API’s without getting ads).
We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.
For now I’m enjoying things, finding it a bit “slow” but that’s been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.
If things get big enough that hobbyist instance owners are getting overwhelmed, it might be a good idea to organize a nonprofit, under the NPR business model. Not collecting data or breaking your brain with advertisements, though periodically, they’re gonna have to go hat in hand, and beg users to feed their Patreon. Hey, I’m more than happy to throw a little in!
Nice thing about this business model is that being a nonprofit, the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive), instead of to make money for owners/shareholders.
the point of its existence is to fulfill its mission (to help independent distributed social media thrive)
I read that as “disturbed” and for some reason the sentence still made sense to me…
The true mission of Lemmy is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable :)
oh-wah-ah-ah-ah
The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.
There is no money to be gained from “gathering data” here. All the data is already public, which means that Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. are already free to copy whatever they would like. That’s part of being on the open Web.
We’ve also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation
Troubling but understandable. Beehaw is basically fediverse tumblr, they need to prioritise their own safety.
It really highlights the other main issue though in that people really want a new alternative to work so are obsessed with growth at all costs. But maximising the influx of new users is going to have negative effects on quality, culture, and community.
A bit of friction to onboarding, and a slow steady growth that allows a community to form is what’s going to set this up for success
It’s like hanging out at a friend’s house. Follow their rules.
And be nice.
And take off your shoes.
