With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.
Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.
How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people "group package". Lemmy access is $8/year.
Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:
- the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
- Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can't hide under the veil of anonymity.
- You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won't disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.
Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:
- I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial...
- The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won't see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.
Last but not least: I'm offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.
Thank you for your attention, and don't hesitate to ask anything.
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I see your point. What I mean is that I will only know that an user has done something stupid if they get reported, and those that are subscribing to a paid plan will be less inclined to do stupid/illegal stuff because they will have gone through some form of KYC.
I am not tracking your outbound clicks, I am not running any A/B tests, I am not even requiring a valid email address for people to signup. I want to make this as simple and frictionless as possible, except for the friction of payment, which is how I hope I will be able to make the whole system manageable.
Which platform of payment are going to use? Paypal , Stripe?
Stripe. Currently the billing works in "pre-paid" model: you make a deposit and your subscription and there will be scheduled deductions, and the contract gets inactive in case the balance goes negative.
I also want to make possible to accept crypto, but realistically I am yet to see any customer that is willing to pay $3-4 on ethereum fees to send me 10DAI
Bitcoin Cash my dude. If you’re doing Stripe, integrate BitPay.
Given that until last year I was working on a self hosted open source payment gateway for ERC20 tokens, you can bet that I already have an idea of how I would do it. And it certainly wouldn't involve BTC or any of its forks.I already had a prototype of a payment gateway that could route payments through Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Raiden, Loopring and even CEX like Uphold.
But this is a topic for another day.
What if a user has opinions you don't like?
Also I'm not sure I understand the value added service of having you between me and a free Lemmy instance.
I am not sure I understand the question. Moderation is not about policing everyone's opinion, but just to ensure that the environment is not toxic. People can disagree on many things and still participate in a civil society.
The problem is that it seems like you're the arbiter of what is toxic and what isn't, and it doesn't sound like thats something you even consider questionable.
And again, what's the value add?
How is that different from the moderation done by your instance?
My instance is not a paid service and I still haven't understood what your value add is, especially now that you're saying you're the same only with a price tag.
I'm honestly trying to understand what the value you're pricing into your model. Your replies are not heartening in that respect.
Your original question was about moderation, this is what I'm addressing.
My argument for the "value-add" is already on the post here. Basically, I don't believe that "free" and "donation-funded" instances are sustainable or healthy for the fediverse.
You seem to have a new account on lemmy.world, which might indicate you are missing some context. Lemmy.world is "a free service" which was having a bunch of outages and was struggling to keep their service running because of the load. They, llke many other instances, try to provide "free" access but end up having to ask for donations from some generous patrons. So what you end up having is a system where a few people end up paying tens of dollars per month to support a service that is used (and abused) by tens of thousands of freeloaders.
There is also plenty of cases of Mastodon or Lemmy instances that were funded by "donations" but that the admin ended up closing the service and leaving the users stranded. Communick is an attempt to show having a commercial service can lead to better quality of service and less worries for its members.