I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?

Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.

  • SmallAlmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    13·
    1 year ago

    No ads, no tracking, just donations. The model proved itself when twitter went to shit and a big influx of users came to mastodon, it all worked out.

    • small44@lemmy.world
      31·
      1 year ago

      Many mastodon instances shut down. There’s always a risk that at some point the donations are not enough to sustain an instance. It could be very problematic if mods lose their communities when an instance shutdown.

      • Moohamin12@lemmy.world
        1·
        1 year ago

        Perhaps what we need is a backup code or some kind of exportable file with all our data (subbed communities, interactions, yadda yadda) which we can port over to a new instance if necessary.

        • Matt@lemmy.world
          2·
          1 year ago

          Mastodon does this (you can download a full backup of your entire account - although not sure about media) every 7 days, which can be imported into various other Fediverse platform accounts, depending on what they allow.

          I suspect that all Fediverse platforms worth their salt will make this a core feature.

        • Norgur@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Yeah, especially with Lemmy which is a lot more permanent than Mastodon is. You can screenshot your old toots but you can’t screenshot a userbase. There should be a way to migrate a community to another instance while keeping the subscriptions.