this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

For discussion about the lemmy.ml instance, go to !meta@lemmy.ml.

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How is Lemmy going to make money? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 year ago by buda@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit's daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don't think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn't to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

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[–] honk@feddit.de 11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don't think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don't end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Recurring donations are sustainable IMO. Most open source projects have less than a handful of devs, and get less donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Yet their work touches / reaches so many more people.

And not just devs, but mods especially should get paid. The existing centralized social media platforms are essentially built on top of mods unpaid labor.

[–] ablackcatstail@goblackcat.net 3 points 1 year ago

@dessalines @honk I'm all about donating to the indy software developer. As a thank you for the quality product, I gave 40 bucks to the developer of NGINX Proxy Manager. It's truly a project above commercial quality.

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