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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I'd prefer communities and instances focus on providing clear mission statements, support commitments, community guidelines and working on what is possible with what we have. I'd hope that much of the work being done on the Lemmy code over the coming year or so is cve's, bugfixes, mod tools, scalability & further integration with other areas of the fediverse.
A financial health bar sounds like a lot of work to add and a lot of work for people running an instance to commit to keeping up to date for little gain, or possibly negative gain. Most businesses struggle to provide accounts every year or two and this would likely involve international market and crypto integration alongside converting donated or removeded hardware, hosting and maybe most importantly labour given freely. Real time financial reports for thousands of open source social instances seems wild. To make a personal instance appear green I'd need to show the running cost of ~3.72% of my server and then donate to my own instance and publish it, even then it might be red for half the month if I don't get my direct debit date in sync.
A lot of money changing hands on Reddit was mods being bribed to promote content, we'd need a bar for that here too so we can see how corrupt the mods of each instance are. Maybe a light/dark bar showing declared and undeclared funding.
Prosperity is often linked to abrupt change.
In my experience of open source over the past decade or so often the most reliable projects over the longterm are those with a focus on code & community, not finance. If the finances go too far into the red they will ask the community for support. Pat's Slackware or Theo's OpenBSD seems like good examples, they are beyond dependable and the finance model seems to involve ignoring it until the lights are about to go off and then asking the community for help. Gentoo & Debian for the community approach.
A small instance with a dedicated admin and a solid community behind the admin that's currently losing money may be more likely to be still growing and thriving in a few years than a huge instance at the moment with an admin focused on the short term financial possibilities of another mass Reddit migration next week.
How is that supposed to work, though?
Like, say I'm wildly corrupt and taking money to push stories about Smurfs. Big Gargamel sends me $1K a month to use my influence to seed stories that talk negatively about the Smurfs. I don't say shit. Big Gargamel doesn't say shit. How would the "undeclared funding" bar know?
Just the same way the funding bar works. As long as no one is lying, confused, lazy, mistaken or busy it's bulletproof.
Ah. Of course. People will declare the undeclared money they receive.
You've got it!
People just won't lie about ill gotten gains, tax returns or funding on lemmy instances. The green bar will be truth.
The reason the enshittification of reddit and everything is because at the end of the day bills need to be paid and developers need to take breaks or pass on work to other. Look at how the mobile lemmy app mlem got treated so badly and was too stressed to keep developing it.. Servers cost money. Open source software development cost money. Just like Wikipedia i want to support it to ensure it can stay sustainable. Making it easier for people to see the health of the server helps keep it sustainable and alive
Reddit was maintained by unpaid mods. It it now being shat on by unpaid mods.
I appreciate the need for funding I just don't see the 'funds health bar' being useful fediverse server feature.
Reddit is clearly owned by Venture Capitalists that are forcing the site to go to shit so they can fill their pockets with ad revenue. If we self funded reddit or forums etc so that we can keep ot sustainable and focused on being the best instead of making a small number of people an infinite amount of money we would still have the reddit we love.
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.