4 ms·

So you are saying that you would pay for an account for Mastodon or Lemmy?

discardedrefuse 2y ago
You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.
- rglullis 2y ago
  This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only given to paying subscribers. I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com https://communick.com) since 2019.
  - jonathanyc 2y ago
    I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account. Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon. Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
    - rglullis 2y ago
      Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services. To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.
      - jonathanyc 2y ago
        > To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with. For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets. I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out. The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.
        rglullis 2y ago
        Hey thanks so much for trying! Sorry about the issues, I will take a better look tomorrow (1am now in Germany), but a quick look in my admin panel and I don't see any new user sign up. Did you get to the "set up auto pay" page without logging in?
        jonathanyc 2y ago
        No rush! The crazy thing is it looks like I already had an account (!) but hadn’t signed up for anything. So I actually must have found your site in my search somehow, then maybe I hit the same payment issue? My username on your site is jyc.
- chairmansteve 2y ago
  Probably cheaper to run a mastodon instance, since there are no development costs.
skyfaller 2y ago
I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported by donations from the community. I have not put my own money in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to run it. But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network: https://gotosocial.org/ https://gotosocial.org/ https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion My server: https://jawns.club https://jawns.club Our finances: https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub We're currently paying for managed Mastodon hosting on https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/
- rglullis 2y ago
  How do you think your community would react if you switched to a "everyone pays a little bit every year" model?
  - skyfaller 2y ago
    I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity. Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now. I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.

You might be surprised to learn that many people do donate money to their instance of choice. Enough to cover server and admin costs? Probably not. But it shows some willingness to pay.

rglullis 2y ago
This is not what I am asking. I am asking if OP would join a commercial provider of Mastodon, where access is only given to paying subscribers. I am asking because I happen to run one of those (https://communick.com https://communick.com) since 2019.
- jonathanyc 2y ago
  I was actually searching for a commercial Mastodon host around a year ago. I would have been interested in your service but it did not come up in any search results. I remember checking out Librem One, but the signup process for that was very buggy. Other services were targeted towards people who wanted to host instances themselves, not just have an account. Even now I can’t find your service in the first page of my search results. I ended up just setting up a recurring donation to Mastodon.social via Patreon. Your service looks very cool. Just pointing out that it is very hard to discover even for people who are willing to pay, as the GP comment notes and hopefully providing a useful experience report.
  - rglullis 2y ago
    Yeah, in my case it gets specially hard because Mastodon's project page does not point to commercial providers, only hosting services. To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. I am more inclined to pivot into a multi-protocol client (like Pidgin) and offering ancillary services than trying to pick a champion and invest into promoting it.
    - jonathanyc 2y ago
      > To be honest though, I think that Mastodon is an evolutionary dead-end. It had a huge head start in the space, but I am reasonably sure that it is not the future of the open social web. Interesting, this was my layman's read too after a while of trying to get into it. To me it felt like it was opinionated but in ways that I disagreed with. For example, instead of a separate UI for private messages, they just add another option to the visibility selector. From a technical perspective I suppose this is somewhat elegant, but from a UX perspective it felt wrong. I saw a thread where people disagreed with it and the maintainers told them to pound sand. Similarly with quote tweets. I know you mentioned not trying to pick champions, but are there any alternatives that you thought were particularly interesting? I'm willing to put in a little time to try things out. The other thing I want to note is I just tried to use the "Set up Auto-Pay" button on Communick and got the error "Could not set up auto pay. Please contact support". I'd love to sign up though.
      - rglullis 2y ago
        Hey thanks so much for trying! Sorry about the issues, I will take a better look tomorrow (1am now in Germany), but a quick look in my admin panel and I don't see any new user sign up. Did you get to the "set up auto pay" page without logging in?
        jonathanyc 2y ago
        No rush! The crazy thing is it looks like I already had an account (!) but hadn’t signed up for anything. So I actually must have found your site in my search somehow, then maybe I hit the same payment issue? My username on your site is jyc.
chairmansteve 2y ago
Probably cheaper to run a mastodon instance, since there are no development costs.

skyfaller 2y ago

I am an admin / mod for a Mastodon server that is supported by donations from the community. I have not put my own money in the pot for a while, because I'm donating a lot of time to run it. But I would pay if I had to, and I am considering paying for a GoToSocial server to experiment with an allowlist network: https://gotosocial.org/ https://gotosocial.org/ https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion https://codeberg.org/oliphant/islands/src/branch/main/ion My server: https://jawns.club https://jawns.club Our finances: https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub https://opencollective.com/jawnsclub We're currently paying for managed Mastodon hosting on https://masto.host/ https://masto.host/

rglullis 2y ago
How do you think your community would react if you switched to a "everyone pays a little bit every year" model?
- skyfaller 2y ago
  I'm sure we would lose some people if we switched to mandatory payments. Since this is already a pretty small community (dashboard currently says 171 active users), I wouldn't care to experiment, since we'd risk losing the critical mass necessary to have an active local timeline, which for me is a major reason to run your own server. I'd also hazard a guess that many people go inactive for a while, and then check in again randomly when they need more social media in their life for whatever reason, and mandatory payments might interfere with that movement in and out of inactivity. Finally, I think pay what you want is better so long as it works, since it doesn't exclude people who don't have money, but do contribute to the community in other ways. The only real reason to move away from pay what you want is if it doesn't pay the bills, and our finances are fine for now. I can see a place for mandatory payments if you're providing extra services at a steeper price, such as paid moderation, but I think the number of people willing to pay what moderation at a living wage actually costs... is rather small. Perhaps if we made moderation more efficient, e.g. sharing moderation decisions between servers, paid moderation could become more affordable by splitting the cost between more users, but there are several problems with that approach... one being that moderation by members of your community is always going to be more clueful than moderation from outside your community.