No Stupid Questions

This is a great question. To add to this, what happens if/when/eventually there's enough users to warrant big players (celebs/fortune 500) wanting to dip their toes into Lemmyverse? I don't see this happening soon, but with enough growth, SOMEONE is going to want to reach this audience right? It'll start slow but if the trend continues, it's inevitable. Which is ok I think. The way I imagine it, celebs might have their own preferred curated/verified Lemmy instance. Maybe they'll use affiliate links for merch and promos?

I think if a instance owner decides to try to profit, it can happen. They could let advertisers have an account that promotes products and allow such posts to bypass community rules and disregard vote counts. You could theoretically profit from running a lemmy instance. But now your instance risks defederation and user might start leaving.

Edit: I think the smarter thing could be just asking for more donations than is needed to run the server, and pocket the excess funds. That could go on undetected as long as you falsify your operating costs to make it seem as if more funding is required. I mean I don't know if someone could actually make a living of asking for absurd amounts of donations.

RemindMe! 1 year

I'm not sure this is necessarily a bad thing. Imagine inge a stable commercial service with high quality moderation (hopefully paid for by the operators) but with an option to follow other instances and transfer your data to another instance. That could be pretty good for drawing in people who just want something that works and refuse to leave reddit.

I think long term someone will come up with something. How hostile the community they arrive to?

Entirely up to how well we remember how it went the last time.

Most servers already seem to have Patreons or similar donation platforms running, and subscriptions would not surprise me as everyone starts to settle into this thing. It would make a lot of sense to help spread the load and since content wouldn’t be gated behind the subscription, I can’t see why it would be bad.

I think I have similar thoughts on ads. If an instance wants to run ads to support itself, I don’t see an issue as long as those ads aren’t “federated” out and sent to other places.

I think the ability to have all of these different setups, without restricting any access to content, is the beauty of the fediverse. At least as I understand it.

Monero.town has a donation address and while you can prove you are human by linking an existing social media account during signup, you can also do this anonymously by donating a small amount of Monero. So far this model seems sustainable :)

I'm not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.

Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?

Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?

Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.