Something along the lines of a monthly donation model, perhaps with a nominal “pro” system. A badge to showing that you donate and how many years you’ve been donating (users can disable display of such badges if they want).

Look at what nostr community is doing with zaps, I think it’s cool

Still learning about the fediverse, but… What about a simple percentage system so you can donate whatever you want. A large portion goes to the instance that you register with and smaller portions go to Lemmy programmers. Maybe portions can be set aside for parts of the fediverse that we all use like gif/video hosting. I’d say make the percentages the same across the fediverse so people know what goes where.

Personally I’d prefer monthly giving like patreon.

I think finding a good revenue model is fine, as long as the orgs that host these services are transparent in how they operate and have business models that are not focused on 10x growth year over year. Selling Ad space has always been a good model as long as you maintain a healthy separation from your Ad customers and your regular users. Data mining is always a huge money maker but then you violate your users privacy. I wouldn’t know how to build this into lemmy or other apps but an idea I have had lately is having a sliding scale for users to decide what info to share with advertisers as well as giving the user a percentage of the money that was made on their information. That way the org hosting and administrating the service gets funds to keep the site going and their users are compensated for the sale of their personal information.

Would love to see an optional monthly subscription to Lemmy where funds are automatically distributed based on how you used Lemmy that month. There would have to be a lot of research on how to avoid exploitation, but Open Collective might have some good examples of how to securely handle funds like that

I’ve been wondering if there’s an opportunity for instance admins (e.g. lemmy.world) to offer managed instances for user domains.

It would be great if it was easier for the average person to own a domain and use it for email, matrix, Lemmy, etc.

Crazy idea here: would it be possible to have a model where everyone’s phone is a mini personal instance, syncing with others when the user opens the app? When a phone is offline that phones content would be unavailable too, but that is part of the truly decentralised model.

No monetization, donations only without begging.

Have any of you guys ever hosted… anything? It’s not as expensive as the people asking for your money would have you believe.

I highly recommend getting some of your own experience before assuming people who say “server costs are expensive” are discussing in good faith.

Most of them are scumbags who are looking for useful idiots to peddle their bullshit for them.

There are a few ways to monetise the Fediverse.

• Donations - to devs and those running the instances. Lemmy gets enough from donations and grants to have a couple of full-time devs but it still doesn’t pay a lot. dansup using Kickstarter is proving interesting. Donations to your instance works well and a lot of places that offer this bring in enough to cover hosting costs but not much more. Open Collective has proved very good in this regard.
• Classified ads - [email protected] does a decent job of bringing buyers and sellers together.
• Subscription newsletters/blogs - Ghost is moving into the same space as Substack but with federation, so should do well.

So you wouldn’t be able to give up the day job by running an instance but you might if you were the lead devs of a popular service or if you had a thriving following on Ghost.

Well there was sub.club but it died.

Have a portion of my taxes be set to pay for fediverse general stuff, or for the fediverse instances hosted on my own country. Honestly, with how important remaking the internet is this should be being managed at the level of the big payers, not at the level of individual payers for whom a donation has more fees attached than the donation amount itself…

Well depends if we’re talking for instance admins, developers or users/mods. Would probably need different models.

Sub.club wasn’t successful in offering a content monetization model on the fediverse

Unsubstantiated claim: Any set of rules that aim at distributing money according to some merit can be exploited in a way that those who get the most money are not those providing the most value.

Or less formally: Any game can be cheesed.

Monetizing is what ruins other places.

I like the way my home instance does financial backing through an open model, and that’s part of why I chose it.

An ideal is enough contributors to keep the lights on and to reimburse the admins for their time spent in keeping it afloat. Moderation should always be a volunteer position for those that want to support their individual communities.

Any excesses in finance I would hope go towards future running costs (to a point), feature development and then charitable donations in that order. Non-profit on paper and in practice.

This is viable for a small instance. Maybe even larger ones if the users are altruistic enough as a whole.

I think keep it donation based. Perhaps do a Lemmy gold where u can donate to boost a comment/post and said donation is split between content creator community instance etc.