Literally what I said - Lemmy is not a free service. Free as in free beer. Most of Lemmy is a service that costs real money to real users. Maybe not to all of them. Maybe it doesn’t cost you in particular anything, but it costs another user on the instance money. They’re just happy to pay for you. There’s a ♥️ button up top in the web interface. There’s likely another link in the sidebar. If you follow them to the respective payment service, you can see how much it costs and sometimes who’s paying for it, if they chose to not pay anonymously.
I believe in paying for the things I use - unless there’s no practical way for me to pay. See below - because if I don’t pay, whoever supplies the service I use is either an idealist and I’m a freeloader, or they’re milking my private data for money.
That’s why the Fediverse instances I use are hosted on SDF and I pay SDF for the privilege.
There are also cases where I would like to pay for the service but I can’t. For instance, Youtube: I would gladly pay for Youtube. I literally consume hundreds of gigabytes worth of video every month. $10 for that is very cheap.
But I can’t because paying Youtube means having a Youtube account, and there’s no way in hell I’m opening any account with Google and help them track me and monetize the shit out of my viewing habits even more than they do. So I don’t.
I wish I could, but Google is so invasive that it’s a better option to freeload off of them than pay them the money they legitimately deserve.
Literally what I said - Lemmy is not a free service. Free as in free beer. Most of Lemmy is a service that costs real money to real users. Maybe not to all of them. Maybe it doesn’t cost you in particular anything, but it costs another user on the instance money. They’re just happy to pay for you. There’s a ♥️ button up top in the web interface. There’s likely another link in the sidebar. If you follow them to the respective payment service, you can see how much it costs and sometimes who’s paying for it, if they chose to not pay anonymously.
Makes sense. Thanks for explaining!
I believe in paying for the things I use - unless there’s no practical way for me to pay. See below - because if I don’t pay, whoever supplies the service I use is either an idealist and I’m a freeloader, or they’re milking my private data for money.
That’s why the Fediverse instances I use are hosted on SDF and I pay SDF for the privilege.
There are also cases where I would like to pay for the service but I can’t. For instance, Youtube: I would gladly pay for Youtube. I literally consume hundreds of gigabytes worth of video every month. $10 for that is very cheap.
But I can’t because paying Youtube means having a Youtube account, and there’s no way in hell I’m opening any account with Google and help them track me and monetize the shit out of my viewing habits even more than they do. So I don’t.
I wish I could, but Google is so invasive that it’s a better option to freeload off of them than pay them the money they legitimately deserve.