cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/1239521
Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much "gold" was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.
We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.
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Anecdata for sure, but my commercial instance for Mastodon, Matrix and XMPP (and now, Lemmy) has been going for a lot longer than a lot of "popular" Mastodon instances. I've seen already my fair share of "community-based" instances that the admins simply burned out.
Comparing support for open source projects is not the same as comparing for the support of an specific instance of the server. People that use Slackware/OpenBSD/Gentoo depend on their developers, so if any of the devs stopped working, they would have to find another Linux distribution. If an instance admin is struggling to keep up, the freeloaders are more likely to jump ship than start donating and nowadays there there is always yet-another instance popping up.
Thanks, appreciate the insight. I did not consider that and am still trying to get grasp of things.
I mentioned Pat & Theo as it seems on the few occasions they do reach out to keep the servers running beyond current donations, people do reach out to help with running costs. People don't jump ship and the community persists for decades.
If a linux distro is struggling to keep up, freeloading users will often jump ship too. Linux isn't short on distros to choose from or small community distros that died.
I'm not sure what you provide....what is the advantage to using your service over just deploying a lemmy or mastodon instance on any cloud service?
For the flagship instances (Lemmy, Mastodon and the @communick.com Matrix/XMPP servers):
For the Managed Hosting servers, the answer is simple: if you can host your own instance on your own, great! But there are plenty of people out there who are more interested in having an instance that works well for them than dealing with the technical aspects of running an instance.
Awesome & thank you, makes sense.
I'm freeloading from FMHY, kbin.social and mastondon.uk as I try to figure out how this works and been playing around with self hosting instances, this is interesting.
A small fee for a safe and reliable place seems reasonable, cheers for the post :)