Bill is paid by using donations through open collective and Patreon:
https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld
Which is confirmed in their blog post about Lemmy:
Also I started paying for the Lemmy cloud servers from the mastodon.world funds
So mastodon.world, calckey.world and lemmy.world are all run by ruud and looking at mastodon.world it states they have 3 admins in total. So 2 besides ruud. And i assume the same group is involved in all of these.
This is just what i managed to figure out before joining lemmy.
Also !lemmyworld@lemmy.world might be a good follow.
I don’t want to be that guy but does this guy have a good track record? Kind of feel he managed to get a good Lemmy domain (generic sounding one) and now he has the biggest instance.
Do we know he’s a jolly good fellow?
I’m not too worried about it, because:
• He’s been running a fairly large Mastodon instance too, and it seems like it’s been going well.
• If I end up disappointed, the beauty of the fediverse is that I can up and leave. In fact, I already did: I started with an account on Beehaw, and I moved to Lemmy.world when they defederated a few instances whose contents I was interested in. It was a fairly painless move.
So for now I’m donating $5/month, and we’ll see what happens from here.
Sounds like an unhealthy powermod situation again
It will be the case with the fediverse in general. But the point of the federation is to make it easier to switch instance, reducing the power of the owners.
An ideal solution to this would be a fully distributed system. But this has many technical challenges as it pushes the complexity on the client side. And the moderation is then also more complex. Federation aims at finding the good trade-off between giving power to a few capable people to manage the network, yet making it difficult for them to abuse the system as users can easily switch ship without losing their entire social network. This is similar to emails - changing your email address is a pain, but you don’t lose your contacts and can still talk to people with your new address.
