With all the talk about expensive clients, how to fund the developers and big instances not managing to keep up with the influx of users, I’d like to tell you about my work on Communick and what I am proposing as an alternative model for a sustainable growth of the Fediverse.

Communick operates on what I believe the simplest and fairest model for hosting a service: instead of giving free access to every one and trying to recoup costs by donations or exploiting your data, access to all of Communick instances are based on cheap subscriptions from everyone.

How cheap? Take a look at the current plans. Mastodon access is $9/year and it can be as low as $0.50/month if you join with 10-people “group package”. Lemmy access is $8/year.

Making it subscription-based brings a lot of benefits:

  • the instance only grows if the paying userbase is growing. There is no scrambling for the admins (me) to find a way to deal with a wave of users.
  • Moderation gets a lot easier. Trolls really are not interested in paying just to talk shit on the internet, and the fact that I will have their name on file means that they can’t hide under the veil of anonymity.
  • You will know that the instances will be professionally managed and they won’t disappear because the admins were over their heads, or because they got decided to run a service on a free ccTLD, or because of any case of extreme incompetence.

Other things that I hope can convince you to try these services:

  • I am pledging to give 20% of my profits (ie, profit = revenue - operating expenses - eventual salary for employees) to all the fediverse projects I am running and offering. By signing up with Communick, you will be helping Mastodon, PixelFed, Lemmy, GoToSocial…
  • The servers are in Germany and I am obsessed about ensuring that people can use my services privately and without being tracked. The reason you won’t see a cookie pop-up on my website is because there is no tracking cookie that you need to be warned for. Logs and IP addresses are not kept and used for short-term uses like rate-limiting.

Last but not least: I’m offering FREE FOREVER access to the first 250 users that sign up to Lemmy. Please create an account on the main portal and then sign up for Lemmy. If your username on Lemmy matches your username on the portal, I will approve your access right away.

Thank you for your attention, and don’t hesitate to ask anything.

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      32·
      1 year ago

      Thank you for the kind words. I think that “subscriptions” got a bad rep nowadays because companies are trying to exploit people by trying to turn everything into a subscription, but in this case it really is an ongoing service that incurs costs for as long as the customer is using it. If you have any idea for a fairer model to charge, I’m all ears.

      • randomguy2323@lemmy.kevitprojects.comEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        If I knew how to do it , I will create a script or a one click install , manage and backup a lemmy , mastodon , etc instance. So everyone even non techie will have the availability to self host their own instance :) I dont know but that just me maybe its not worth it but who knows.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          21·
          1 year ago

          There are plenty of installer scripts and self-hosting is not that difficult. The difficult part of self-hosting is guaranteeing uptime, avoiding connectivity issues, ensuring the software is up-to-date, etc.