this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2023
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I think it's fair to say that people who say things like this don't understand that it costs money to host these servers. All the enjoyment from working on it in the world doesn't pay for database or image storage or CPU cycles or bandwidth.
You're kind of jumping over the comment there. You pay for database or image storage or CPU cycles or bandwidth PLUS the management, execs, HR, shareholders if this were to be run like a company. What they're saying is we kind of skip the most expensive costs by relying on the fediverse as a non-profit entity.8
I'll be honest, the reason I skipped over this is because it's entirely unsubstantiated. Show me an up to date breakdown of reddit's costs that shows how much is exec pay versus infrastructure costs or whatever.
We're talking an entirely different scale here as well. Anyone can host Lemmy on an old computer and that'll work to a point, but as more users join you'll need a bigger, faster computer. Eventually you can't make a computer any bigger and you need to start offloading key components on to separate computers - one for your database, one for your image cache, etc.
Before you know it, you suddenly can't make the database computer any bigger, you need to split that off into more and more complex architecture. You need more caching, a CDN to make sure requests don't hose your CPU and the site remains fast. All big Lemmy instances will hit this issue with scale sooner or later. When that happens, it starts to become a full-time job just looking after that infrastructure, which is now going to cost you thousands of $ a month. Then you need to factor in that the lemmy software isn't currently built for that kind of scale (It does scale to a point, don't get me wrong), it's built to scale out in instances, not to scale single instances. It wouldn't take a huge amount to add in the code necessary to help an individual instance scale out, but someone has to write and maintain that code, which in itself starts to become a full time job or several full time jobs.
The future of lemmy is bright, but it will hinge on users supporting their communities and if they don't, expect things like ads to appear.
Look at lichess.org vs chess.com.
Lichess non-profit, and is maintained by a couple of devs funded purely by donations.
Chess.com has hundred of employees and requires tens of millions of annual revenue to break even. It has investors that expect yearly growth.
The user experience is not much different.
Wikipedia is another great example of a massive website that is run as a non-profit, is ad free and has stayed true to its original purpose.
Chess.com has something like 10million active users per day, I don't think they're directly comparable. Plus the problem space is much, much simpler with an online cheese game than federating thousands of servers with millions of users.
To be clear, I never said that this was impossible, just that we need to keep expectations in check and that nothing is free.
And Wikipedia?
We should strive to create a platform that isn't captured by the interests of advertisers. You're stating the obvious that nothing is free.
Alternatively, you can simply stop accepting new members (or shut down completely) if the donations dry up and you can’t afford to run your instance - or if you just don’t want to do it anymore. Other instances will take up the slack. Lemmy will live on. That’s how the fediverse works.
This is definitely what I am interested in and have concerns about - look at the growth of .world already. Assuming growth continues, there comes a point where there has to be some major upgrading and additional costs to deal with all aspects of that growth and the complexity and services and requests and compliance that comes with it.
How will data be retained, or won't it? What if an instance becomes unsustainable or the owner decides they no longer want to deal with it all - there's a lot of questions and at the moment it doesn't feel clear.
I do homelab and am very aware of the costs. I wasn't saying it's free. I'm saying that donations and maybe a gilding system could easily keep these servers afloat. No need for ads.