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Welcome to the Age of Paid Social Media (gizmodo.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 10 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

Would you be opposed to paying to use Lemmy? Someone's gotta pay them bills. Currently it seems to be donation focused, but that might not scale. So what's it going to be Player2@sopuli.xyz, ads, or a "premium Lemmy subscription"/tax/due/contribution?

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  • [–] 16 points 2 years ago

    Some run the servers with the expectation of donations. Some run them at a loss. Some of us selfhost.

    There are all a variety of ways to keep Lemmy free, where as Reddit is hosted by Reddit. They decide everything about Reddit.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    You can set up a Lemmy instance with just a docker file lmao it's not exactly a large scale operation to upkeep.
    If somehow every Lemmy instance went paid only, I'd host my own instance and invite my friends to use it too.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    This is basically just paying with your time/hardware/electricity rather than money.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    Okay? And currently people pay with donations. The suggestion from SkyNTP was, in the most condescending what, what would you do if it became a paid-subscription. Paying with your time or on donation are acceptable. Paying as a part of a subscription is not for me, and I imagine many in the FOSS-oriented fediverse.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago

    I worry that donations may not be enough and people say that it's not expensive to run. Regardless, I don't think they're forcing me to identify myself and building profiles on me to sell to the highest bidder. I'll pay Lemmy for that.

    If I pay Facebook and Reddit they'll do both even if they say otherwise because I believe they lack ethics.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    I would argue that there is a fundamental difference to this forum style system consisting mostly of text and links, and a traditional 'social media' that is entirely photography and short form video. Correct me if I'm wrong, but TikTok, Facebook, etc. store all of the multimedia content on their services themselves, right? The costs cannot be comparable.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Storage is a negligible cost for companies of this caliber. Infinite growth with infinite profit is the root cause of these problems.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    No way. Spinning rust isn't getting any cheaper these days and these companies are expected to not only serve all their existing content, but allow for free uploading and storing in perpetuity. Google is a great example of one of these massive companies trying desperately to reduce the amount they have to store. They recently ended the free Google photos backups and they are more aggressive with deleting inactive YouTube accounts.

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