It’s a great idea, but I believe the majority of users will not opt in or donate less than the value they derive from the service.

Radiohead in the late naughts released an album as “pay what you want” on their site and only 60% paid anything with the average price being paid of only $2.26. An album has always been closer to $20 in my mind so they took a risk and got pennies on the dollar. It was still profitable and they have adoring fans that would likely support them regardless so it’s probably why it’s so “high” compared to other things like applications.

Just food for thought. Personally, if I were to donate to Lemmy id be more inclined to donate to the devs than the admins, we only have finite dollars to spend after all. But I think the admins shouldn’t be left holding the hosting costs without some means to break-even. Maybe Lemmy devs could like profit-share with larger instances? But the charity system is all predicated on people opening their wallets/hearts to the cause. Tangible benefits is an easier sell to most users, and very popular revenue stream.

Radiohead album info: https://songremains.substack.com/p/pay-what-you-want-how-radiohead-proved

Thank you!

I think what you’re doing is valuable. This thread is trying to find out if there’s a better way than just soliciting donations, which per some of my comments I note that people are very hesitant to pay for something they can go elsewhere is “free”.

The value proposition is there for Communick, and I wish you luck. But having universal revenue stream through Lemmy itself, like instance based awards (or some sort of additional flair or features for a subscribed user) could be a carrot-on-the-stick to generate a more sticky revenue stream imo

Very intuitive 🙄

They make great claims on the main page but have no support on how they are going to maintain this

Privacy No tracking. No data collection. Our business model is simple: we host a service and some of our customers pay for it. No need to track you, sell your information, look into your messages…

Where is this hosted? By whom? Why the ellipses at the end? Are they really not looking into my messages because it’s spelled out kinda suspiciously. How can we trust them if they don’t give us means to vet them?

End-to-End Encryption Keep the conversation to yourself We only adopt messaging protocols that provide end-to-end encryption, so you can be sure your conversations are protected and no one can snoop on them.

This is something in this thread we found out couldn’t be true. A tabular matrix of E2E encrypted systems they provide would be more transparent or some asterisk that fediverse isn’t e2e encrypted.

I think it’s actually pretty good value proposition at $29/year but idk, if they were more transparent it’d be an easier sell. But to my untrained eye it seems a bit deceptive and/or lazy

literally not there on mobile

Yea that would make sense, I checked and yea Lemmy doesn’t have e2e encryption and state it’s basically impossible on the fediverse. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/3319

I like the concept but I’m skeptical, if they had a more granular breakdown and stated explicitly Lemmy isn’t E2E encrypted then I’d give them more credit. But it seems more like a marketing site than something useful for those who want to vet the tech they use. Their docs are basically useless https://communick.com/docs

When I was hosting Lemmy it was through Elestio (kinda like DevOps as a service) in DigitalOcean, was like 50CAD per month. So $29/user is also steep imo. It can be done for much cheaper with a VPS but then you gotta manage the box yourself. But you could literally host all these services in your own VPS for likely less the cost of one user subscription 🤷‍♂️

Edit it’s 29/annum not month. Better value prop than I’ve made it seem but wasn’t clear until I clicked on the link to buy

This looks interesting, but curious how they have E2E encrypted messaging in Lemmy? I haven’t checked for a hot minute, but I thought Lemmy DMs were not E2E encrypted?

If they are, and they are donating 20% of their profits or whatever to the underlying techs then why can’t they prioritize getting that into all Lemmy instances? Also, how would this work if you DM me and I don’t use Communick? Does that mean your DMs to me aren’t encrypted? this is a main feature they’re advertising, but they don’t say how?

This sounds hopeful at best and dubious at worst. Where’s the proof? Their website is barren of any sort of documentation.

Ninja edit: some else is always paying for you

Yes, and I hope this discussion can help make this an avenue for devs to get some ideas of what would be acceptable by today’s users.

You mean a bacteria found in the feces of nearly half the population of dairy cattle contaminated REAL milk? Like, I mean the udders are several inches off the ground and cows notoriously never lay down, so where could this come from?

Must be big Pasteurizer sabotaging the pure REAL milk products and keeping the sheeple from consuming the REAL milk products the lord has given us. They want us weak and feeble and only untouched milk straight from the udder can grace my temple of a body. No Satan, not today! You will not take my REAL milk from me!

Oh hey, I seemed to have dropped something ヽ(´ー｀) /s

A nearby town (in Canada) has some issues with an encampment of tenters on the city’s land. The city want to evict them to make a new transit hub and have enacted bylaws trying to make it illegal to rent. They’ve spend outrageous sums on police and lawyers trying to kick them out. It went to court and a judge ruled that it violated Canadian charter of rights to be evicted without anywhere to go. So the city spent like $1.7 million on bs and still needs to provide alternative site or housing.

https://www.ctvnews.ca/kitchener/article/documents-show-how-much-region-of-waterloo-spent-to-fight-for-encampment-bylaw/

I don’t really care, do you?

Aha! So they’re small enough to fit into the tubes to block your internet traffic! Ingenious!

This sounds great and if it’s able to be validated even better!

I’m a software dev and historically tough problems took hours to days to solve. Sometimes you’d get lucky and find someone with the same issue in StackOverFlow and just “borrow” the code and adapt it to your use case. There is internal debate on doing things easy and fast, à la AI, or getting a dopamine rush from solving hard problems. I like solving hard problems but I also enjoy deploying and setting up apps on servers and playing with code and infrastructure so code isn’t the only way to solve problems. One day I might start a project where AI is the the dev, other times I want to roll up my sleeves and start typing my own code. So long story short,I haven’t figured out my stance with AI 100% myself.

In my full time job, it’s a no brainer as I have multiple projects and lets me deliver faster and there’s a push from the top to use AI. In my personal dev experience I use local LLM with an open source VS Code plugin and have built full apps just to understand capabilities. I found out after using local models for a few months with a plugin that it basically doesn’t care if you’re signed in they’re siphoning chats locally to their servers. So I forked the repo with the source being in GitHub and had AI iterate over it for a day where it removed all the telemetry code. Got the vsix build for vs code, uninstalled the one from the marketplace and loaded my own build. It runs faster than before and gives me a piece of mind my data remains local. So AI good at doing grunt work like this, I don’t think I’d get much satisfaction of reading 100s of thousands of lines trying to identify all the different ways it was phoning home.

The flip side is I’ve been developing a game on and off for a few years. I’ve handcoded everything and had a pretty dumb bug that I couldn’t figure out with the networking. I don’t want it to be AI and want it as a showcase for my own abilities. I wrote a queue for the game to hold networking events, and everything worked fine when running 3 or 4 instances on my local machine which stayed in sync basically because I could only interact with one instance at a time. So it seemed fine. I was using an array to use FIFO processing, but accidentally had a used pop_back instead of pop_front in the code. When I tried multiplayer with some fam and friends it epically failed as each client was woefully different. I read, re-read and tried to figure out what was wrong for days. Sometime you get blinded by looking at the code too much, and it was just that one spot I couldn’t see. After much mulling about I decided to use Qwen to take a look at the file, sure enough within seconds it found the bug 🤦‍♂️.

So I’m not sure this story has a point, but hopefully the reader can gleam some insights to what a greybeard thinks about AI. It’s a powerful tool and has its uses. I see many people shut down and immediately lambast the poster (perhaps rightfully so) and froth at the mouth at even and eye batting something might be AI. It’s as if the reader sees AI is the beginning of the end of civilization. I mean I get that, but Pandora’s box has been open and unfortunately unless we get a Carrington event knocking out all electronic devices on the planet, it’s here to stay. We need to understand the people that use it and their intentions more than the output (though closed/open source software is another topic of discussion). I mean AI writes somethings better than me, other times it’s horrendous and goes down rabbit holes that make no sense.

I understand AI is disruptive and there are many reasons for concern with security and reliability of AI generated slop code. I think any Lemmy client should be open source so folks can review the code and understand what they’re installing on their phone and fork it if needed. Disclosure of AI is paramount so each person can make their own informed consent with what software to engage with. Ultimately, newer generations won’t know anything different and AI designed apps will be as ubiquitous as anything else. I’m sure there will still be pockets of folks doing things they like, such as coding the human way, but the draw to AI is an interesting one and for myself I’ve not reached consensus. Maybe when I do, I’ll leave the field of software development as it’s an entirely different game today then it was a few years ago.

Disclosure: no AI used for this post, just some dude trying typing on his phone.

Fuck you too eh?

Belt size said 32-34” and I’m like I’m 34”! This is perfect. Now this is belt

Does Lemmy have a remindme bot like Reddit? I’ll set a reminder for the grand kids to pick it up for me

Damn man, didn’t know I could get a whole virtual star. Do I get to pick the galaxy it’s in or is it assigned at random?

Rochester, NY response 💪