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.
This is a really interesting idea, I'm definitely considering it. I'm already giving on lemmy.world patreon more than your plans cost. I have two questions. First, just from a business perspective, how do you think about differentiating yourself from the donation based servers? Is there something of extra value that people get from your instance and service that they can't get elsewhere?
I'm also interested in your moderation and federation policies. I think a potential barrier here is paying upfront for a year only to disagree with a federation decision down the line. Maybe you could have different instances with different policies? Like one that is federated with threads, one that isn't, one that's federated with hexbear one that isn't. Maybe that's overly complicated once you start adding up all the different combinations that people come up with (personally I'm fine with threads, meh on hexbear, and a no on explodingheads).
Thank you! I've started Communick about 4 years ago as a side-project and today it's the first day that I'm feeling that there are some people that "get it". Now I'm trying to make it my full-time job and the reaction here gives me some hope.
For your questions:
yes, I will be working on integrations that are going to be specific to the flagship and managed instances. Just yesterday I launched a tool that imports your twitter follows to mastodon, which I hope can help people migrating away from there. If you have any other ideas for features you'd like to see, I'd love to hear them.
Moderation is always going to be a difficult problem. No matter how we slice it, any decision will make some part of the group unhappy. So far I've been focused more on making sure that the our instances are not the ones causing problems in the fediverse and recommending to block/mute individuals from outside for whatever reason they deem fit. I've also found (so far) that it has been more effective to ask people in our instance to not follow trolls/extremists from outside than to try to argue for an instance-wide ban. But, like I said in the original post, having a paid-instance has done wonders to ensure that all members are there to make the best use of their time and has made things very civil.
With the Mastodon/Lemmy instances growing, I will certainly have to revisit this approach. I am not planning on keeping multiple instances to cater to the different "factions", but I do believe that one way to solve this will be by letting those that disagree with the "main instance" to create a "fork" into a managed instance. For example, it 50 people are on the flagship instance and they decide that they are not happy with the moderation, they can create their own instance (which I would still be hosting) and apply the rules that they seem fit. Price-wise things wouldn't change and they would be probably happier on a "forked" instance than on the main one.
I am not into subscriptions but you seem like a nice guy with good intentions for the fediverse I wish you the best man.
Thank you for the kind words. I think that "subscriptions" got a bad rep nowadays because companies are trying to exploit people by trying to turn everything into a subscription, but in this case it really is an ongoing service that incurs costs for as long as the customer is using it. If you have any idea for a fairer model to charge, I'm all ears.
If I knew how to do it , I will create a script or a one click install , manage and backup a lemmy , mastodon , etc instance. So everyone even non techie will have the availability to self host their own instance :) I dont know but that just me maybe its not worth it but who knows.
There are plenty of installer scripts and self-hosting is not that difficult. The difficult part of self-hosting is guaranteeing uptime, avoiding connectivity issues, ensuring the software is up-to-date, etc.
Yeah those are good points , I should have mentioned it is not everyone doing self hosting. I do it because I want to learn.