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How are we going to pay for all this? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by psylancer@sh.itjust.works to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I'm really enjoying lemmy. I think we've got some growing pains in UI/UX and we're missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn't going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?

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[–] dogmuffins@lemmy.perthchat.org 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.

Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.

It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.

That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.

[–] arcrust@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Yeah exactly. If my instance stickies a post asking for donations, I'd throw them a couple bucks. No doubt