I’ve been talking to many people about the controversy with Reddit, why I left it and why I went onto Lemmy, Kbin and Mastadon instead. Some of my friends have commented that the control is still a problem as other platforms and it is all dependent on who owns the software, who owns the hardware, who are the admins, who are the moderators and which community or group has the most influence.
Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?
So … for the ELI5 version of the question … Who owns the fediverse?
So the question just goes down one level … who owns the instance? It’s an important question as it then determines what influence can occur with any instance or any owner or owners of an instance.
Yes, no one can own the English language but the language can only occur because each and everyone of us own the hardware because the hardware is built into our bodies.
A fediverse instance has to be run from some location and by some hardware … so the question I still wonder about is … who owns any one instance … who owns or controls Lemmy.world? who owns and controls lemmy.ca
hello! i’m the current owner & admin of lemmy.ca.
Who are these people that influence the most control on the fediverse? Are they Conservative? Are they Liberal? Are they Republican? Are they Democrat? Do they lean to the left of politics? to the right? or are they center? Are they even political? But also if they had to be would they easily or not so easily influenced?
i don’t really consider myself very policital, but I have taken those “vote compass” things just to see where I would fall, and i typically lean left. not sure exactly what you mean by easily influenced, but I would hope that I’m not. I think of myself as fairly level-headed, and probably overly analytical about things, and I typically don’t try and let my emotions get involved in my decision making.
I have to run but can answer more questions if you’d like. or i can maybe do an AMA later?
That’s amazing that you responded … that would never happen to any commercial social media service out there.
Thanks for that.
My concern is not so much what your personality or political leanings are … to a degree, if any owner holds extreme views, it should be concerning.
My biggest concern is money and funds - where it comes from and where it goes.
The work you guys (owners of an instance) are doing is admirable but no one should expect you guys to provide any and all of these services for free. I am sure you are working hard and tirelessly to keep this instance working and maintained but it must take up a considerable amount of your time and energy. Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?
My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.
The other side of that question is … if you are suffering a loss … shouldn’t we be helping you with your work? We shouldn’t be taking your work and energy for granted and expect you to work for free, pay for services for us who enjoy them. Even if you are able to pay for services, hardware and rentals … we shouldn’t expect you to work for free.
I know you have to maintain your own privacy but as users of your service, it would be nice to know what your situation is … maybe you are independently wealthy and you don’t care about money … I don’t know. Or maybe you have no money at all and you are barely getting by.
If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.
that would never happen to any commercial social media service out there.
Actually it does. Lots of people used to talk to the dude who started Twitter and he would respond. Making “important” people accessible to randos like you or I was kind of the major benefit of the whole service, especially in the early days.
Likewise, I’ve personally had comment chains back and forth with /u/spez on Reddit on many occasions, and a few other notable admins, founders and CEOs too (keysersosa, aaronsw, yishan and kn0thing spring to mind) although they weren’t necessarily CEO at the time.
That said, it certainly is nice when communities can stay small enough to still have regular interactions with each other, admins and users alike. And fediverse is designed to promote exactly that. These huge communities like lemmy.world and even lemmy.ca are sort of a sign we’re not using it quite “right” and we’re still following the “centralized” model, but that’s okay they are serving an important role for now and will continue to serve an important role probably forever, but hopefully never too important, and it will always be possible to break out into smaller more specialized communities but still stay in touch with these bigger ones.
We subscribe via one of the funding methods in the sidebar. ☺️
Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?
I currently have a day job not related to this at all. I’m a software developer by day. I currently accept donations that go towards the hosting of this instance. The users so far have been very generous, so we have enough to carry us for around 6 months (from what I remember), based on current usage. As long as we don’t get any huge spikes in usage (and i’m likely talking about in the thousands of new users joining), we should be ok for a while. If donations slow down I will be able to maintain the instance on my own, but ideally i’m hoping it can run off donations. I will be as transparent as I can be about this instances financials, as I plan on doing a monthly (maybe every other month?) “State of the Instance” type post, that I’ve seen done on mastodon, and some other lemmy instances too.
My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.
I have no plans to ever profit from this. All donations will 100% go towards our hosting costs. If, for whatever reason, this instances changes owners, I will transfer whatever donations are left over to the new owner as well.
If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.
Thank you! You can see from the donation link above how much we currently have. As I said earlier, we’ve had quite a few generous donors, so I’ll let that up to you! I’ll be adding my hosting expenses into opencollective as well so that will be visible too.
Hopefully I’ve answered most of your questions? If there’s anything I’ve missed or if you have other questions, let me know!
I’m not a rich man (I wish I were and I would just send more to you) but I’ve subscribed to a $5 month plan … if all us users did the same, it would be more than enough to pay for the services you run and pay you for the work you do … I honestly believe that we users have to learn that we need to directly pay the people who do the actual work of maintaining these open source social media systems … even if it means that each user contributes a dollar a month, with thousands of users, it would all add up … if we don’t, we will eventually run into the same scenario of someone coming along to monetize it, commercialize it and sell it all along with our content.
I look forward to what you will with this instance … keep up the good work, you sound like a good man who is working towards admirable goals.
thank you! it’s greatly appreciated! i will do my best!
If you’re interested in seeing how much they’re getting in donations, the sidebar of lemmy.ca lists their opencollective and liberapay - the numbers are listed publicly. They get CA$30.59 per week from liberapay (CA$122.36/mo) and CA$21/mo on opencollective. Roughly $100 USD/mo
Hey @smorks I am interested to hear how you will handle content that some people may view as “hateful”? One of the problems I often see in some reddit communities is that they can be heavy-handed on moderation and it can often mean the subreddit is filled with primarily left-leaning comments as the right-leaning comments are counted as “hateful”. I’m personally looking for an instance where I can see a diverse set of viewpoints and based on what you said here it sounds like this may be an instance that is supportive of that.
Just to be clear, I am not asking whether people would be allowed to be blatantly racist, but whether people could disagree with political movements that lean right/left without being censored? I personally think communities thrive when they can have more open, productive good-faith conversations about topics. When people get censored it usually seems to create more division and more hate in my opinion.
first, i’m one of the admin’s here, and try and let the mods of their respective communities handle the bulk of the reports. i will only step in if there’s anything blatantly against the rules.
i don’t care if it’s left-leaning or right-leaning comments. i’m going to remove it if it’s hateful, and will start with a temporary ban if it continues, and a permanent ban if it persists.
the first two rules from this instance’s sidebar read:
- No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
- Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.
does that help?Just to be clear, I am not asking whether people would be allowed to be blatantly racist, but whether people could disagree with political movements that lean right/left without being censored? I personally think communities thrive when they can have more open, productive good-faith conversations about topics. When people get censored it usually seems to create more division and more hate in my opinion.
i agree 100%.
if you want to give me an example of what others deem “hateful”, but you do not, i can tell you where i stand on it and why?
hope that answers your question!
I can throw out a view examples of content that I have seen deemed as “hateful” in local subreddits that I personally don’t think fit under the purview of “hate speech”.
- Comments removed that were speaking about drivers from a particular city being bad. The city has one of the highest insurance rates in Canada due to high collision rates. It however also has one of the highest immigrant populations of East-Indian people so I will often see any comment vaguely mentioning this cities poor driving being deemed “racist” simply because it could be a racist implication despite the bad driving comments having no race component and being backed by stats.
- Comments that are against PRIDE movements. Now again I am not meaning blatantly homophobic comments like “Gay people suck”, I mean comments like “I don’t agree with this content being taught in schools”. In many subreddits both of these comments will get removed and result in bans. Which I’d agree is valid for the first comment, but not the latter.
- With COVID-19 specific topics I saw some pretty heavy handed moderation as well. It’s been a bit so I don’t have any specific example, but I saw people who would be presenting simple opinions who were trying to have good faith discussions/debates have their comments removed and get banned. Again, I am not talking about the blatant “don’t get vaccines, they cause autism” clowns. During COVID I actually was working for a public health clinic and worked in vaccine clinics. So don’t get me wrong on which “side” of things I stand on, but it was always disheartening to see people who had differing opinions, or who were hesitant about things get mobbed by people, comment removed, and banned. People who could have had reasonable conversations and eventually maybe formed different science-based opinions instead get shut out and pushed off to fringe communities.
Now don’t get me wrong, I am a moderator on some communities on reddit and I know content-moderation in general is a hard topic. Knowing someone’s intentions behind a comment can sometimes be murky and that is often part of the issue. I come from a viewpoint where I think it is important for people to see comments that they may disagree with or may even offend them. Of course there is no need for posts that just flame someone, or attack specific immutable characteristics, but I think there is harm from being too isolated from different viewpoints as well.
thank you for taking the time to send me those examples!
i 100% don’t agree with your second example. from my understanding (i have a son currently in grade 3), they are teaching about acceptance and inclusiveness. and i know not all schools teach the same thing, and it could vary with different schools and at different grades, but i personally don’t see anything wrong with that. If people don’t want to join in in pride parades, then they don’t have to, plain and simple, that’s their choice. But don’t hate on the movement just because you don’t agree with it.
for your first and third example, it’s hard to say, since like you said, intentions (and context) matter a lot. so I will always try to take all those things into consideration.
Anyone can run one. Why not run one yourself for $20/month?
Which leads to the question … what if the owner no longer has any money to pay $20 / month … what if his instance grows popular and now he has to pay $40/month $100/month $500/month … I can appreciate the goodwill of people but whenever anyone puts lots of energy into any activity, eventually it costs money, time and effort … all of which does not come for free and usually comes with a price
I would assume this whole instance would go be snapped away…im assuming it gets federated to other instances so if this server does die there is a back, but not 100% sure. earnest the owner is taking coffee donations if you want to support. Currently hes paying 100eruos not sure per month or year…
I mean, this was a very real issue for every random forum site back before the internet became consolidated. In some cases people would donate to keep the servers running, in other cases the ownership gets passed on to someone that could keep servers running. At least things are way cheaper to keep running nowadays.
Yup or just websites in general until everyone wanted to move to FB…
I see Smorks has answered your question but just to follow on from what @Hotzilla said, the great thing about the software being open source is that it’s totally possible for any group, for example an Indigenous arts collective, to run their own self-funded instance for their members, which can still inteact with others in the fediverse.
for example an Indigenous arts collective, to run their own self-funded instance for their members
that is a neat idea … but I am like most internet users and social media users … I don’t have time to do these things or organize them … I will participate in many of these activities, but I have neither the time, resources, skill or money to take part in them … I’ll support those who are capable and do support the same communities and perspectives I like … but the question always concerns me
->who owns/pays for/manages/maintains the service I am using
To be clear, I am not saying to you, “you must do this yourself”.
I am only saying, the source code of these platforms are resources that anyone can use.
There will be many different ways of owning/paying/maintaining. There will be many kaupapa (purpose and process), some you will agree with and some you won’t.
But, spread the word that the resources are here for us all. You and I might not have the energy but we probably know groups who would.
You are in Canada on lemmy.ca and helping to support smorks, I am in Aotearoa reading your words through kbin.social and I donate to kbin’s dev, Ernest. It’s wonderful that we can have this conversation across platforms like this. I think great things will happen.
I guess to put the question back to you, what would motivate you to pay $5/month or $50/year to support LemmyCa?
You’re also talking to people who also think it’s an important question. My answer is “I think we should all pay for it”.
What would motivate me is in understanding and knowing who the instance owner is and what kind of person they might be and what kind of instance they would like to run … and all of it explained and presented to me as clearly and openly as possible.
The instance owner of lemmy.ca … @smorks … answered many of my questions today which motivated me to go ahead and sign up for a $5 a month contribution
I agree with you … we should all pay for it, even if it is a small amount of a dollar a month … across thousands of users, it would make a huge difference. If no one pays for it or not enough people pay for it … money, greed, desperation, economy and finance will always creep in to corrupt what an instance owner will or won’t do.
These are all good questions and lead you to explore more about what it means to run software.
So as well as the instance (domain name / hardware server) admins, there are also the open source developers of the Lemmy software. They keep things updated and put out new features and releases. They currently have a (partial) grant from some European agencies who are making sure that open source software isn’t all built and owned by American corporations.
It would be good for every instance to allocate some funding to the open source software they rely on.
I’m one of the people responsible for (currently a test Lemmy instance) news.cosocial.ca. Our main service today is our Mastodon server (cosocial.ca). We are a registered member-owned Canadian cooperative. Every member has paid at least $50 per year. We currently have volunteer moderators and server admins, our goal is to eventually pay those roles. More on our blog.
We’re also here to be a resource to anyone running services in Canada, especially if you need legal or other help. /me waves at smorks
Back to keeping things running: the Lemmy software needs a bunch more features to scale. The moderation tools are very basic, there are a couple of mobile apps in development that are very early on. We should think about pooling funds and donating.
It’s great to see Lemmy.ca on OpenCollective (we use it for Cosocial too). I’ve just donated as a $5 monthly backer. Thanks for setting this up!
Everybody is different, but I’d suggest subscribing as a backer or just tossing in a one time donation to start to support @smorks@lemmy.ca and Lemmy.ca.
thank you Boris! i’ve sent you a long PM to your matrix account.
Hi Smorks! I used LibrePay. Is Open Collective the preferred platform? If so, I will switch going forward. :)
thank you! i don’t currently have a preferred platform, i know that liberapay doesn’t take any cut of the donations.
Great to know. 😺
Great to see this and come along for the ride! Dang it. I realize now that I used LibrePay to donate. Is Open Collective the preferred method?
htpps:/lemmy.world is run by Ruud Schilders (@ruud@lemmy.world) and htpps://lemmy.ca is run by Andy Brandt (@smorks@lemmy.ca). That information literally took me a matter of seconds to google… there’s no conspiracy. The deal is that literally anyone can spin up a server and fire up an instance. The answer is different for every instance (usually).
Your friends are stating the obvious - pretty much everything in the world is owned by someone, whether it’s a Huffy Princess Bike or a message board server. The difference between Reddit and Lemmy is that Lemmy is open source.
If you don’t trust lemmy.world and lemmy.ca for whatever reason, it’s trivial for you to move on to another instance and continue using Lemmy on an instance that makes you feel more comfortable, and still get the Lemmy experience. Or as others have pointed out, spin up your own instance, but with blackjack and hookers, then you can defederate from whomever you wish. That’s when the fun really begins (but by “fun” I mean tremendous workloads and tons of responsibility. And financial costs :p)
oh noooooooo I’ve been doxxed! 😂
I think it is important information to know … Reddit was started by a small group of tech developers who then went on to sell their site to a large media corporation … and for many years, everyone just hoped that the corporation would stay open and free for everyone forever.
The same concern should be made aware for us all here … we can’t expect these owners, moderators and instance owners to just pay for stuff, run them for free and we get to enjoy them for nothing. If owners start feeling the pinch of costs, funds, money and resources because their instance becomes too popular, eventually one of two things happen … they either shut down / slow down / degrade … or they start seeing monetary value to their work and think of selling it to someone or something for a profit.
As I said to many of my responses … if I know of an owner or developer that needs money to keep these tools operating … I would be more than willing to pay for something or help out financially in some way … I’m not rich and neither are the majority of users on here, but maybe all of us together sending a bit of cash to the right people, we can keep these services from falling into corporate hands.
While I agree in principle with the idea that we shouldn’t be freeloaders, there is another side to it.
I used to put a dozen hours a week into unpaid tech support for all comers, just because it was fun and it helped out the community. When I moved away, I started doing other things (volunteer firefighter, etc.)
My brother pours tons of work into his custom birdhouses and they are very popular. He absolutely refuses to take any compensation because it is a labour of love.
I don’t expect that any one instance will remain available and viable over the long term. If things look dire or the mood strikes me, I’ll look into spinning up an instance, just as part of being a good citizen. I assume that human nature will ensure that there are plenty of people like me.
I’ll kick in a few bucks here and there and human nature means that there are plenty of others doing that, too.
Never underestimate the drive of someone with a hobby! Hell, I wish my hobbies ran to only a couple of hundred dollars a month!
Same here … I’ve been involved in lots of construction, renovations and building over my lifetime … my family owned a construction business so I know a little of everything - plumbing, electrical, construction, woodworking, structure, concrete, HVAC, roofing, landscaping, heavy equipment and all sorts of other things construction related
Yes, I’m like you … I love what I do and I enjoy helping people out with big or small projects when I feel like it … but often there comes a time when the work is so big, so time consuming and costs me money that it makes one wonder why I should do the work … it also makes me wonder sometimes if people are just taking advantage of me.
I love doing stuff for people … but I also appreciate it when people give something back for the free work you offered them … especially when there was a lot of work or energy or skill involved.
The work you do may not seem like much … but to have the skill, knowledge, education and training that you have in order to complete complex technical tasks is worth a lot of money … especially for us who don’t have that knowledge … never sell your abilities short. It may seem like nothing to you but it is a world of difference that many of us can not cross.
I understand how feel because I feel the same when I help out others too … but I also believe that we should foster and build a culture of encouraging everyone to contribute a little bit of money everywhere to experts and knowledgeable people like you, to owners of instances, to developers of open source software and to those advocating for all of this … if we don’t, we will always run the risk of all this activity and all these projects becoming lost either by burning out all this volunteerism or creating situations where owners become so desperate for money that they see no other option than to sell their work and their efforts to the highest bidder.
You raise some important points. When I started providing tech support to all comers, it was about building a community. There did come a time though when too many were exploiting my skills in that it was all take and no give. After that, I started working only by referral and eventually transitioned to that field as my living, rather than a hobby.
I think we have to be willing to throw a bit of cash around, but not everyone can support every worthwhile endeavour.
Each operator has to find their own balance.
I think the advantage here is that the average instance size can remain small and relevant to the individual users values without sacrificing the amount of content available in one spot. The owner of lemmy.world (for now) is easier to reach out to and share concerns with. You can’t go directly to Spez or to Reddit’s future shareholders with a problem in the same way you could with an instance’s owner. It’s the (im)perfect blend of old school bb forums and the mega platforms.
The biggest issue with the fediverese is the non-transferable nature of your profile. If that can be resolved, I’m all in. Afaik that is a planned feature for Lemmy in particular.
