With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.
Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.
How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people “group package”. Lemmy access is $8/year.
Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:
- the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
- Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can’t hide under the veil of anonymity.
- You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won’t disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.
Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:
- I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial…
- The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won’t see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.
Last but not least: I’m offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.
Thank you for your attention, and don’t hesitate to ask anything.
I’m not sure I’m on board. I see why you want it though.
4/year for all services and a wiki style donation set up?
OR a yearly price that goes down with usage? If you use the fediverse enough the price goes down to an irrelevant price like $2/y (for all fedi access). So it starts at say 8/year for all services then goes down based off your activity or like every year you have a login. If you don’t login it cancels the subscription automatically and if you reactivate your account you’re back at 8/year.
Year one - 8$
Year two - 6$
Year three - 4$
Year four and on - 2$
And everytime paytime comes around there’s an option to donate more if you want to. Maybe with some other benefit? Link up with an app developer and if you donate 10$+ thank you get to pick from a paid app to get for “free”?
For the first: I know it’s an unpopular opinion, but I don’t like the donation-based model for social media instances. I don’t think it is fair and I think it’s self-limiting.
For the second: having the price going down with usage might be an interest way to increase “customer loyalty”, but it feels a bit like one of those “growth hacks”. If I saw someone offering that, I am not sure I’d like it. Also, $2/year might not even be enough to cover operational costs, if you factor in things like media storage and backups.
Maybe I’d have to find a different price policy for people living in middle/low-income countries and I could entertain the idea of “corporate sponsorships” (e.g, every month there would be one pinned post for someone paying for the visibility) to subsidize users but I guess that the average internet user from any OECD country can well afford $8/year. Don’t you?
Interesting perspective
I like this idea, buying 3 years or something for less sounds nice