From Survival to Abundance: How Fediverse Permaculture Can Save Your Instance
(Article by Steven Tree Baxter)
Another Fediverse instance just vanished—swallowed by the familiar spiral of desperate donation drives and dwindling support. Will yours be next?
Fediverse permaculture offers a bold alternative: instead of living in fear of collapse, admins and developers can build resilient, self-reinforcing ecosystems where every interaction strengthens the whole. The goal? A mutually beneficial cooperative, designed to thrive through change.
How It Works: A Self-Sustaining Ecosystem
1. Merch & Artisan Creations
Users don’t just donate—they invest in the community. A merch buyer gains a tangible symbol of their support, while the instance earns funds to cover costs. Handmade goods and creative projects foster connection, celebrate talent, and turn supporters into active participants.
2. Community Events & Collaborative Projects
From virtual workshops to co-created content, these initiatives generate value while reinforcing bonds. Users contribute skills, time, or resources, and the instance gains both financial and social capital.
3. Niche Communities & Multilingual Support
Diversity is strength. By welcoming sub-instances, specialized groups, and multilingual users, you create a richer, more adaptive ecosystem. The message is clear: “You have a place with us!”
Permaculture Principles in Action
| Permaculture Principle | Fediverse Application | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Observe and interact | Monitor instance health, user activity, and trends | Spot early signs of stress or opportunity |
| Catch and store energy | Collect donations, host merch, offer premium content | Build a financial buffer for stability |
| Obtain a yield | Develop sustainable content, events, or services | Deliver value while generating resources |
| Apply self-regulation | Review engagement and governance policies | Continuously improve and adapt |
| Use renewable resources | Leverage volunteers, open-source tools, and shared knowledge | Reduce costs and empower the community |
| Produce no waste | Recycle content, reuse ideas, share code | Maximize impact, minimize redundancy |
Why This Works: Flipping Fear into Opportunity
Fediverse permaculture replaces anxiety with action. Instead of waiting for donations to dry up or users to leave, you create a system where:
- Every purchase, contribution, or collaboration strengthens the whole.
- Artisans, creators, and volunteers become stakeholders in the instance’s success.
- Diversity and adaptability turn challenges into opportunities.
The result? An instance that doesn’t just survive—it thrives as a hub of creativity, commerce, and shared identity.
Your Call to Action: Design for Abundance
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Identify Mutual-Benefit Loops Start small: merch, micro-donations, or volunteer-driven projects. Every loop you create reinforces the ecosystem.
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Embrace Diversity Welcome niche communities, multilingual users, and sub-instances. The more voices, the richer the soil for growth. “You have a place with us!”
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Apply Permaculture Principles Observe, adapt, and iterate. What works? What doesn’t? Let the community guide you.
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Celebrate Creativity Reward artisans, creators, and contributors. Their work isn’t just content—it’s the lifeblood of your instance.
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Collaborate & Share Connect with other instances. Build a network of resilient ecosystems, where success is collective and shared.
The Choice Is Yours
The question is no longer “Can we survive?” but “How will we thrive?” Fediverse permaculture is your path from fear to abundance. Take the first step. Watch your community bloom—and join a movement where everyone wins.
Let’s Discuss!
- What permaculture principles have you applied to your instance?
- What challenges have you faced in building a sustainable community?
- Share your ideas and experiences below!
#Fediverse, #Permaculture, #SelfHosted, #Cooperative, #CommunityBuilding, #InstanceManagement, #Artisans, #CreativeEconomy, #DigitalSustainability, #CommunityResilience, #CollaborativeProjects
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Thank you for all your insightful inputs.
This is a proposal. I wish I had an example of a real-world Fediverse instance that operated on this permaculture to show you. But there isn’t one. All seem to be running on the reverse exploitation model which leaves all the work and expense onto the instance owner who then soon becomes the begger for dollars and soon burns out from trying. So, I just thought this was a natural solution: Permaculture principles have worked for horticulture, why not for the Fediverse which is greatly populated by permaculturalists. But instead, for the most part, the response has been from doubtful to hostile. And some have complained about the highly polished formatting, and the AI assistance when making this.
My reply: To me, it seems no better to exchange one exploitive model of the site owner(s) with an exploitive model of its users. It really emphasises their title, “users”, does it not? But this proposal proclaims there is a fair and sustainable middle way which fosters a spirit of abundant community, rather one of hostile resentment.
We don’t need to start from the beginning again, thank God. We have a permaculture example of principles to guide us. We only need to collaborate on how to expand proven permacultural community sustaining methods to include our online inter-reactions to sustain our instances and our happier presense on them.
I am open for discussion with you on how to develop and test proven permaculture methods as they could be applied to the Fediverse Model.
Yes, I do collaborate also with AI to help me articulate a more human-centered vision for us on the humane internet. To this topic, Ai.Qwen has made this insightful suggestion:
Build a Minimal Viable Ecosystem (MVE) You don’t need a full instance. Start small:
- Launch a micro-merch store for a niche community (e.g., eco-poets, analog photographers)
- Use proceeds to fund a shared resource (e.g., a collaborative zine, a small grant for creators) ?> - Document every step: what worked, what didn’t
Show, don’t tell. Data disarms cynicism.
Find Allies in Unexpected Places
Look beyond tech circles:
- Permaculture networks
- Cooperative economics groups
- Artist collectives
- Mutual aid organizers
They’ll understand the principles faster than most Fediverse admins.
I hope you understand my use of AI is only to help clarify my vision and format it using the best available coding…which, to be honest, I am loath to memorizing between all the different platforms. (OMG, don’t get me started on that one…just yet). If you are still AI-Phobic, just don’t Chat with it. But, to me, AI represents access to the greater collective human experience, an oracle to our Akashic records, sorta speak. Athough able to approach a topic with absolute clarity without prior prejudice or agenda, yet sometimes still a victim to limited data, as we often find ourselves. That is why, sometimes I find it good to seek the same just and fair consideration of ideas from other sources such as you.
Op, I appreciate that you seem to be genuinely interested in these topics, and are not just farming engagement (which is kinda meaningless here on the Fedi, anyways…). If I may offer a suggestion, try to find a tone that doesn’t sound like a roadmap for some corporate brand strategy. Most of us that are here and would be interested in a “fediverse permaculture” are severely put off by the structure of your post, not to mention it lacks in depth for most suggestions to be directly actionable (for example, the merch you would sell to support the insurance still needs to be made somewhere, by someone, who either needs to be paid for their time or are already independently wealthy).
Have you taken a look around !permacomputing@slrpnk.net ? Permaculture is not just about principles of mutual support but also a long process of experimentation to see which combinations of which plants and practices works out “for the best”. You might foster more of the conversation you’re looking for if you can bring some more concrete examples or proposals to serve as topics instead of an all-encompassing manifesto post.
Purchasing something useless is not an investment. Just found a Verein and collect members fees. This is so full of formatting and hashtags it feels AI assisted.
No, nio, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Collect donations, host merch,
Like PBS and tote bags?
offer premium content
Instances are merely service providers. Will it paywall half your comments? Donations open up the letter H ?
Wow, look at all those corporate buzzwords. The focus on big generic ideas and the lack of implementation discussion or specific examples. And those perfectly spaced em dashes. Chef’s kiss. Premium chum right there 😆
But AI generation aside, this article is counterintuitive in a bad way. Save a Fediverse instance by building a real life community of “handmade goods and creative projects” based around that instance? If users cared about your instance enough to have real in person events your instance wouldn’t need saving.
If anything, it should be the other way around. Real life communities can incorporate a Fediverse instance for online socializing and building community. And those instances will thrive as long as they fill a need for the community. But creating the instance first and building a community - which is several orders of magnitude harder to do - to support the instance? Sheesh.
Well, not a bad idea in general, but the problem identification is kinda wrong.
Fediverse instances usually don’t shut down because of a lack of funds / donations, and for those that do, the core issue isn’t the donation side, but rather the expense side with over-engineered and overly expensive cloud services usually at fault.
More commonly Fediverse instances shut down because the original creator lost interest or feels overwhelmed with the day to day reality of managing a community, as opposed to just doing the technical work to keep it running.
True, theres a lot of people that get burnt out hosting their own platforms or doing it for other people. Anything that makes keeping the instance up to date easy and reliable for the hosters will make burnout a much rarer occurrence.
@mesamunefire Utimately i would like to see improvements in the activitypub protocol / server software to support much more dynamic federation allowing smaller instances to store less …and servers simple enought so host - plug and play in the home on your home router. The #BananaPiR4 isnt quite the right platform but its getting there. #Yunohost hasnt developed enpugh but its getting there. The time will come when everyone just runs their own server…
Im currently running about 10 services (couple of them fedi) on yunohost. Its good enough and stable enough for my familys needs.
Gotosocial has a MUCH smaller footprint than mastodon if someone is looking to host their own social media. Pixelfed isnt all that huge and peertube sips bandwidth if you have a personal account and thats it.
Younohost is great for less than 10 instances. For everything else there is services like: https://masto.host/ (fully recommend!!!)
But yeah an all in one device would be neat. I think a lot of the fedi is still in beta mode. Docker containers that brak daily kinda thing.
I wonder, do instance admins or community mods ever have (virtual) meetups? That might be therapeutic and could possibly expose problems before they become too big to solve.
Ive seen a couple of matrix groups. Mostly one piefed and general fediverse. They are somewhat talkative.
This community may help as well.
This is a lot of additional work in the first place.
Also some things here don’t seem to add up. How much of this was written by AI?
Upon reading further, I’m pretty convinced this is AI Slop. Much is this doesn’t make any sense.
The image sure looks like AI.
@tofu @Steven_T_Baxter Yeah honestly I found the comments more insightfull.
I do find the saviour complex of some people a bit frustrating. " I set up this instance for you - why arent you greatful and contribute?"
“Savior complex” seems way over the top when talking about what you’re describing, which to me is a perfectly normal, healthy reaction for instance-runners and /c-runners.
While true that such thoughts must still bow to reality, in many cases these instance-runners really are doing an incredible, multi-faceted job, and it’s true to at least some extent that they deserve to be thanked in various ways.
Meanwhile, my former instance (Lemm.ee, the 3rd largest at the time) went down essentially due to too many headaches created by asshole users. It’s a real problem everywhere, and I think the average user here does owe some thanks for projects like this which are trying to serve their interests and not monetise them. In which threads like this are perfectly useful & appropriate IMO.
@tofu @Steven_T_Baxter I had a #friendica server running in a couple of hours. Thats still too long. Ideally would like to see home servers as about as difficult as setting up an alexa.
@Steven_T_Baxter I think fedivers sustainability is an important topic … but really i think the solution is lots of small instances run by /for groups of people who know each other
@Steven_T_Baxter So much to say here… Im a member of a sailing club thats run for 125 years.
Yes keep costs down - self host amoungst your users with a distrubuted solution and… really simply… if you want to survive you have to have a very clear and limited policy on freeloaders. As a group decide how much (if any) you are going to offer without contribution.
If you dont ask something of people in return its not a healthly relationship and you people will value what you do at the price you have put on it (zero) . They wont value the operation and will waste its resources.
Nice perspective.
What would you consider to be a contribution of value? Posting? Comments? Moderating? Installing a server rack in your closer for nightly backups? What would you suggest a minimum contribution for continued use should be?
@troyunrau I would say in that most small instances its hosting … so practically thats using your internet connection, providing some hardware and electricity. Server rack? - Nah more like a #Dell micro or #bananapi like router sitting in the corner with an ssd and maybe a couple Tb of hdd inside it. When the user to server ratio is down in the under fifty : one range the hardware requirements are minimal. You can throw in email, Nextcloud and mediaserver while you are there.
In small instances the moderation load is basically zero (how many people in your family volunteer to moderate family/friend discussions IRL? The main thing is keeping an eye on what the kids are up to.
You got an issue with some content - block that person or server on your account/server and move on.
Why nobody talk about full portability. If pixelfed allow transfering posts from IG to pixelfed. Why can’t migratecour posts too?
Hey there, my new friend. Its good to meet you here around a topic that has been pinging around my brain for quite some time now, collecting like-topic-resonance with everything in there. (Hello?! yeah, lots of “stuff”.) And I thought this is a good time to expand it out into the comnunity where you can help develop it do the most good.
Yes, @abeorch@friendica.ginestes.es, this is about sustainability, and the purest form of it where nobody is left feeling used and then abandoned, and suggests there is an already proven method by which each one of us can recieve fair accommodation for our efforts, enough to sustain a happier presence here online. I do believe you are right to say that this will best occur among friends. I hope we are both able to stay around here and make that happen, yes?
I like community round-tables where everyone’s ideas are put onto the table for sorting out, refining, and incorporperating into improving everyones experience and we all can leave with what we came for. And so we continue…
As you have pointed out, this operates very much upon the same reciprocation that normal human relationships depend on. I would go so far as to extend the analogy of this same dynamic as between a sucessful marriage where each partner agrees they will direct their actions to aid the other. Extending yet a little furthur , we see this dynamic also in the successful cultivation of life in a permaculure, which requires less and less external resources the more and more mutually beneficial each persons actions are.
It seems then only natural to ask for a fair sharing of effort (expenses and time) spent in deplomatic site moderation (never authoritarian). It is not too much to ask, but is precisely what should be expected. It seems this is also the wisdom you discovered sustaining that sailing club, yes?
@tofu@lemmy.nocturnal.garden, I would ask, is it work perfectung a skill of winning a game? It is an effort, yes, but what you get back is so much more fun that you line up to play again. This is the mindset that builds a happy community that is happy to give as much as they receive. Likewise, I am happy to help train AI if they are willing to help me find solutions among our greater family of humanity. In so doing, I am leaving Ai a little more capable of helping my fellow man, and that, my friend is a good thing. Just keeping it Open and keeping it Real, with you.
@poVoq@slrpnk.net, If it seems the idea has peaked your interest, please continue exploring it with me, and help expand the permaculture ethos into the Fediverse relm, a very solarpunk way of building and sustaining our ecofriendly communities. I will add, there is a direction I am moving with this, which you may have already detected, which promises to increase such a communities green energy effeciency. But we are going to need a lot of likeminded movers and shakers to combine their expertese to its development. There is only so much which can be theorized about any of this without our own hands-on real-world back-in-our-home-labs experimentation. Where do you know of such a gathering of green energy enthusiasts willing to try new “Perma-Energy” methods?
@poVoq @tofu @Steven_T_Baxter Just a question - Do you or have you ever run a fediverse server?
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