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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.

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[-] FartSmarter@lemmy.world 355 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] lunarshot@lemmy.world 78 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] jennwiththesea@lemmy.world 24 points 1 year ago

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!

[-] chowder@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] rdyoung@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] chowder@lemmy.one 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[-] rdyoung@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] fubo@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] chowder@lemmy.one 9 points 1 year ago

Good thing criminals never use cash, otherwise you could call the world economy criminal.

[-] rdyoung@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

HSBC helping to launder money at the teller window with custom boxes must have been a fever dream.

[-] GBU_28@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Instigate@aussie.zone 2 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Silviecat44@vlemmy.net 1 points 1 year ago
[-] ComeHereOrIHookYou@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Hey! at least we have unlimited reads and writes, LOL

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this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
2593 points (97.2% liked)

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