That depends on how the admins decide to run their instances. After several crises and dramas, etc., I can say that those who decide to monetize eventually will; but so far people have been supporting their admins through crowdfunding.

The really big instances are deciding to be open to Facebook in exchange for big money. A lot of folks in other instances don't like it, and some instances have already decided to defederate from them in advance (search for the hashtag #FediPact). Yes, there's lot of drama involved.

This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there's enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don't see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It'll start slow but if the trend continues, it's inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they'll use affiliate links for merch and promos?

RemindMe! 1 year

I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.

Facebook is makikg their own Twitter aoternative apparently based on Mastodon, so at least that instance will be monetized probably.

Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.

I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.

I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.

Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)

I could see someone trying to sell ads on their instance. But ya I can't imagine many people would join unless they had some other features that are better than other instances.

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.

Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?

Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?

Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.

Text-only forums aren't super expensive to run unless you are doing it on the scale of reddit (or do stupid expensive things like have video hosting)

Another topic, I've seen people here are super hardline about keeping Facebook out of the Fediverse, and I just don't think that's going to work, Now Lemmy Explain how I think this is all going to go down:

If I were Facebook, I'd pay a bunch of big celebrities, say, a certain very talented Academy Award nominated Australian actress, a lot of money, to use Facebook Threads exclusively for a while, and give them the Checkmark. The most difficult part of getting a new social network started is the chicken-and-egg problem of getting that initial audience, which is the problem that Federation solves. So, although some instances will reject anything Facebook related completely, there will be plenty of instances where the userbase would want to interact with their favorite celebs directly a la Twitter, so there will always be instances that wants to federate with this Facebook instance.

But then, those media companies and talent agencies are going to realize, as they did against Netflix, "Hey, wait a minute, why are we paying these middlemen like Zuck and Musk so much money to host a cheap forum? They don't own the userbase on the Fediverse, so is it just for a Checkmark?", and they are going to start their own instances of Mastodon/Lemmy where everyone on their instances is verified celebs, to be used as these celeb's official account with no shitposting allowed, so they can control everything those celebs posts on their server instead. And THAT would be the downfall of Twitter/Facebook.

So, the best path for Facebook to move forward with is to offer easy cloud hosting of federated social media software for a subscription: Pay them 10 bucks a month, they'll handle all the server and upgrades, and even moderation, which will become the easiest way to setup "your own server", and that will be much more resilient to the anti-Facebook pact that is going on right now, because instead of one Facebook instance, now you may have to block hundreds of different Facebook hosted instances instead.

Hmm. In the old days, pretty much every ISP ran a Usenet server. The cost was covered as part of your internet connection bill, it was just part of the service.

I could see a potential future where running a Lemmy instance became table-stakes for ISPs, like Usenet used to be.