Are there any paid services for either Lemmy or Mastodon? Something where, given it is a subscription service, you would expect them to stick around long-term?
You don’t need a subscription for instances to stay around long term - you need to use them. Instances without users shut down, naturally.
Instance owners don’t do this to get rich or have someone else pay the bills I believe. They just want users.
And I think many of us hate subscriptions. :)
I understand, and for the most part, I agree, but I would still like to find a paid instance.
It seems like most instances have a donation link, so you could just donate on a regular basis.
I already do.
Why if I may ask?
I prefer paying for a service rather than donating. When you pay for something, there is an expectation of a service in return. I think the fediverse could benefit from creating an economy for this sort of thing.
I use free, donation and paid services happily. Not against any model.
I do not think paid services are as stable as you are imagining. Lots of paid services go dark all the time. Even major ones.
I think the most stable would be to either run your own or pay someone to run one for you on a VPS. And for community stability, donate to various servers.
For long term, government/nonprofit funding would be good to have I think.
There is also just using one of a thousand free instances.
If you think a meager subscription from your part could pay for about anything (dev wise), I think you are wrong.
He’s talking about just hosting fees though and those could easily be covered for a few $/mo per user unless the instance becomes massive which isn’t likely since most people hate subscriptions and most people even aware of Lemmy are technical enough to host their own if they are willing to invest actual money into it.
Market research to start their own paid instance likely.
That would be tough lol 😆
I mean one day maybe but it’ll be like paying for Linux, which exists, but you have to work for it and propose an important benefit.
For what purpose? Why not a free one? I mean, if the price is right I’ll host you one.
I’ve been considering hosting one myself, this would give me a push in that direction.
Not sure how tech savvy you are, but hosting your own server costs a few euros per month, you decide how long it stays up and you are chief in command.
Second this. And other instances would still be accessible. Even more so since lemmy.world (along with probably some others) is starting censorship, which wouldn’t affect you, since you decide what you can see.
I’d love to self host one for everyone but not allow communities. The idea would be that I federate with everyone no matter what and leave a what the user wants to sub to up to them. No censorship at all.
Not having communities would mean I don’t have to worry about what I host and have other instances defederate with me. Plus, I have no interest in being mod, dealing with DCMA,user reports, etc.
You can disable communities on your instance as an admin, but you would need to disable uploading.
Would that allow someone to still post/upload on other communities? Honestly haven’t looked into this at all. Was going to in a couple weeks when I have time to actually sit down and test
If a user from your instance posts to a community and wants to upload a file, that file will be saved to your instance. Not the instance in which the community is. Keep that in mind.
Commenting because I’m also interested
When I finally look into it I’ll make sure to let you know. Are you going to selfhist yourself or just want to use it if I actually set it up? Maybe you can help me host it. Lol
If you let me know how to help you, then I’m in. I have a raspberry pi 4 and some external hard drives. That’s it. But I also have some money and would rather help you than host a lonely instance, Mr skankhunt
Yep. My instance just has me on it and posting elsewhere works without issue. Anything I upload goes to my instance and federates out. It’s really quite great not having to worry about the instance drama when big ones defederate from each other. I also turned off NSFW so I don’t have to worry about any of that content (legal or otherwise) even hitting my server.
Here’s an image of me making this comment via Sync for Lemmy
Edit: I have community creation locked down to admins, which everything disables them on my instance.
I did the same thing for the same reason. Admin approval for everything and I’m the only admin. Basically a personal instance for me and my friends if they’re too lazy to host but want to try Lemmy.
Exactly. I went one step further and decided not to use my admin account as my main. I don’t run around as root on servers so I try not to do that with apps. It’s easier with Lemmy because once it’s set up all the admin tasks hit my email.
I also wanted to avoid that vulnerability that hit Lemmy World a few weeks ago that was only possible because the server admin got their jwt stolen, which wouldn’t have been so impactful if they weren’t on the admin account.
Your instance will be mirroring (essentially storing a copy of) content from instances it federates with. Depending on your local laws you might be held liable for this.
Have you heard of what happened to Rammy? The admin went MIA, a bunch of trolls set up shop, and they (as expected) got defederated from the majority of the network for being an unmoderated trashfire. Or earlier incidents regarding a bunch of open registration instances getting bot sign ups even if those accounts never did anything (to the best of my knowledge anyway).
If you are going to host an instance open to public registrations you need moderation. Even if it’s just to keep the spammers and trolls at bay.
Yeah, I may go with this option, but I really like the idea of helping create an economy. I suspect one of the Achilles heels of the Fediverse will be instances disappearing after users based their identity on a free server that the host eventually lost interest. Time will tell. I may be wrong. But also may be right.
I think https://masto.host/ offers what you want, you can pay to host mastodon. I haven’t seen the same for Lemmy.
https://communick.com are intending to provide those services. (.news is their Lemmy server)
Good reminder that I still have to create an alt there
elest.io seems to be OSS focused host where you pay per hour and they offer an option to move to any other host.
https://elest.io/open-source/lemmy
https://elest.io/open-source/mastodonThere was a guy here offering that type of service let me look him up and I will share it when I get home.
https://cloudisland.nz/about is a paid Mastodon server.
