Should I donate to my instance or the project itself?
Should I donate to my instance or the project itself?
Hey all,
I just hopped on the Lemmy train, and needless to say, I'm hooked. It's a breath of fresh air compared to the corporate hellhole that Reddit has become, and I'd like to at least pay a little bit for it.
Unfortunately, I'm a broke uni student with enough subscriptions as is, so I can really only justify a buck or two a month. This is where my indecision arises - should I donate to the instance that my account lives on, or to the LemmyNet project itself? I've been digging around, looking at operating costs and such, and I can't figure out which one needs it more (for want of a better term.)
So, what are your thoughts? Or am I just wildly overthinking this?
Opinion based on nothing but how I perceive the fediverse to work and some commentary from Jerry Bell who runs infosec.exchange on Mastodon - support your instance provider.
The costs to maintain the infrastructure are borne by the admins of the instances and for the larger ones, things like storage and transport costs are growing exceedingly quickly. Beyond that, your account disappears if your instance dies, at least until the devs contributing to the Lemmy project figure out cross-instance user registration, validation, and migration.
best thing you can do to help out IMO is to post content here as much as possible. if your instance asks for money help them out.
support your local instance!
I think it could be split 25% lemmy, 75% your instance.
Beacuse lemmy could be funded by all users of all instances, but your instance would be only by its users... Although someone could argue it'd be also in the best interest of other instances to fund any instances with interesting communities.In the end is up to you what's more important.
Maybe one month to one and the next to another?the thing people don't realize is that prior to reddit/twitter/et al there were thousands of forums, chats and groups operated for free by thier admins. Not that we should never consider helping these instances and I do understand the concern of economics here. It would however be good to understand the economics of these systems is entirely different from that of a for-profit social site. Personally, considering the conflict in goals of a for-profit vs non-profit commons, I will likely be defederating any sever operating for-profit, simply paying the bills on the other hand.
Id suggest looking to the older models, keep instances small, use automation on your instance to create amazing curated feeds matched to the interests of your users. The cost scaling issues usually only begin to kick in past a certain size, cloud hosting is surprisingly cheap and its also a way for people wanting to learn and put exp on the resume easily (always been this way).