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.

Thanks OP. We have an opportunity to do things differently, and better.

When I signed up on a mastodon instance winter of 22, I moved a couple times, when I settled down, I setup $5/mo to the site.

When I signed up to lemmy.world, I did the same after a week.

No ads! No spying, no coercion, no CEOs whims to extract profit from accumulated past collective work. Sure admins mods etc can become assholes -- and we can move.

Wikipedia's innards can be icky at times, man politics around some pages is infuriating. GUESS WHAT. WE DONT EVEN GET TO DO THAT MUCH on a corporate site. Most Wikipedia.org pages operate just fine. There's always someone "wrong on the internet" somewhere, we can choose where we put our energies.

Reddit seemed incrementally better than most -- up to the Troubles. But I just got lulled by the mostly great people there and the great conversations, but jarred awake, again, by the reminder than in reality, it was just another pump and dump deal. It was just taking longer than my attention span.

This post missed the most important part people should know: someone is footing the bill for you to use this service. If you're not paying, they will make their money in whatever what they choose. Potential resulting in you becoming the product. Yes, even on lemmy. So if your instance mod needs funding, kick em a few bucks, be their customer.

One of my favourite things about early days Reddit was it’s growing community of positivity. There was actual encouragement to be nice to each other and subreddits were built around celebrating stuff.

Negativity was downvoted into oblivion so you never saw that stuff on the All page and popular pages.

I’m seeing the same thing with Lemmy right now and hope it continues long into the future. The lack of profiteering should really help with this.

Nope. You're the USER. A concept that is as old as computing and yet has gone completely by the wayside recently with the corporate monopolization of the internet.

Good to see it making a comeback.

To quote the first words of the old Dune movie:

"A beginning is a very delicate time."

What we should all take responsibility for is the health and quality of the community. We should be more active citizens, instead of the passive "consumers" we've all been corporately groomed to be.

I think more instances are the answer because this activity can't be cheap. maybe Lemmy.world splits off into 2 or 4 instances. Lemmy1.world etc

This dynamic will have to stabilize in costs. I don't know what that looks like.

Lets see what the future brings. As long as the user count is low there isn't much of a problem, but if instances suddenly have millions of users, it will get expensive for admins to run the service. If too few people donate (what is usually the case), admins are forced to search for other ways to finance the infrastructure. The other point is AI, wheter you like it or not, if Lemmy is big enough, the content (conversations etc.) will be used to train LLMs. Also, the content will certainly be interesting for advertisers to learn user preferences. The difficulty comes with scale.

This is open source. We are neither products nor customers - we are all test subjects.

It's like hanging out at a friend's house. Follow their rules.

Mostly what I feel is gratitude. Personally, I don’t have the skills, technical knowledge, or free time required to run even a small instance. I know I’m relying on the generosity of others, which makes me much more tolerant of delays, glitches, etc.

“If you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”

I see this everywhere, it’s the logical fallacy equivalent of “everything that’s rare has value”.

I’m sure most people, on the top of their head, can think of at least 3 products that are free to use and aren’t engineered to leverage their private information (Wikipedia anyone?)

What is true though, is that if you’re not paying for the product or service, SOMEBODY ELSE definitely is. So the question is: “who is paying for me? And why are they paying for me? What is at stake for them?”

And that’s where I’m just loving it. All dope apps and services without a single person being greedy. I still haven’t seen a dev ask for money for any apps and the crazy part is I would pay for Memmy in a heart beat.

The second quote often leaves out the rest of it.

The full original quote was.

The customer is always right in matters of taste. Notice how that means something completely different than the quote everyone uses?

That is all I have to add.

It truly does remind me of the wide-spread forum days, but with the bells and whistles that comes from connectivity across the board.

It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.

If i'm not mistaken, the original saying was more along the lines of "The customer should always feel he's right". Anyway, the gist is that any side is "always right" should never be the mindset of any sane business or service.

Not entirely related to the topic, but something that I think everyone shold be aware of

People always forget the last part of the quote: "The customer is always right in matters of taste."

;-)

"Do awesome things"

BEANS

I’m actually paying monthly to help with server costs. What am I?

Particularly in these early stages, really clear and transparent communication and plans are key I think.

Nice to see some info on the sidebar links, hopefully will be combined with posts and further info as things progress.

Help people buy into supporting the service they use, but knowing who they are supporting, why, and what their support via Patreon enables.

I think a lot of people would be happy to pay small amounts, but what are the running costs, and what is the roadmap and requirements and cost to scale and improve performance etc. What happens to additional funds over and above the running costs? (Fair compensation for time should be a thing!)

Another consideration is aside from the financial side, what other support will be required to scale and what are plans for that - additional admins, any other mods for "official" communities etc.

It's a very exciting time, delicate but full of potential!

Let’s make lemmy the best community in the world without corporate greed!

While we're at it, big thanks to the instance owners :) I'm donating an Euro a month, it's not a lot but at least something

While I agree and love the idea, it's going to be very difficult to keep things this way. Main two reasons are:

• It costs money to run a service like this as it expands.
• The temptation of the money to be gained from gathering data can be very hard to resist.

I'm honestly fully ready to see ads sprinkled throughout Lemmy instances (but the problem with that is that due to the federated nature, you can place load on one server through the API's without getting ads).

We've also already seen Beehaw defederate from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works due to the sheer volume of users creating issues around moderation (and probably server load as well) https://beehaw.org/post/567170. If that becomes a semi-constant issue I can see people leaving Lemmy, or at least not being as active as they would otherwise have been.

For now I'm enjoying things, finding it a bit "slow" but that's been a bit welcome, no more threads with thousands of comments drowning everyone out.

While I understand what you're getting at, users can be viewed as "the product" if they are contributing content (posts, comments, votes, and other forms of engagement) and "the customer" if they are consuming this content in any way.

Without content or readers there would be no Lemmy, just like for Wikipedia with no editors or readers there would be no purpose for that site either. The terms "product" and "customer" aren't intrinsically related to monetary value.

Thanks a lot for the post! Super nice to hear. Would also like to point out that "the customer is always right" was originally meant for sales. I.e. if they want a meat themed car, sell it to them, dont tell them its in bad taste. So for more ways than one treat those that serve you with respect. Theyre serving the community, not your servants.

The comparison to Wikipedia is a really good one.