• Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    This is why I think there needs to be a way to recoup costs besides donations. Having a blended income is a good thing.

    Donations, subscriptions, “gold”, maybe a light sprinkling of ads or sponsors, and even a paid api for LLMs to scrape.

    • pmk@lemmy.sdf.org
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      7 months ago

      Ads and data scraping? If we can’t survive without that I would rather go back to usenet, irc, and mailing lists etc.

    • TheImpressiveX@lemmy.ml
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      7 months ago

      Donations are the best way to keep all the Lemmy instances running.

      If every active user donated just $5 a month, Lemmy would be able to thrive for years to come.

      If Wikipedia can do it, why can’t Lemmy?

    • Admetus@sopuli.xyz
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      7 months ago

      Not sure if this comment was supposed to end with /s or you actually unintentionally just listed the classic Reddit scenario.

      • Brkdncr@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        Reddit did it wrong. Here’s how I would do it:

        • register as a non profit
        • determine the per-user cost and make it available for the user to see it.
        • create a “show me ads” toggle for the user to enable. Indicate how much this covers their cost.
        • create a “sell my content” toggle and indicate how much this covers their cost.
        • create a donation field.
        • recalculate the numbers and prompt the user to make changes on a monthly basis.

        It’s possible that enough donations would cover the entire cost of operations. In that case, as a non-profit it would be necessary to stop selling out the users when costs are covered.