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?

  • Bumble@fedia.io
    31·
    2 years ago

    It’s certainly a challenge. I run three instances on the #fediverse. Two small ones and a larger one with 450 users. I have a donation page; initially people were enthusiastic and I covered costs. Now, I have regular monthly donators but not enough to cover costs so I am subsidising it. I took the decision when I launched that it could happen and it’s my problem.

    I think there will be many instances will fall away in the coming months due to costs. Especially if you are thousands of users and associated costs.

    We need to come up with a new funding model, where people appreciate you get nothing for nothing. All the large corporates sell your data as advertising for revenue. The greater public do not appreciate they are selling their soul.

    • eekrano@lemmy.ml
      7·
      2 years ago

      Is there an approximate specs per number of users guide to size a lemmy instance?

      • mer@lemmy.world
        4·
        2 years ago

        Yeah, I’d love to get an approximate sense of how much these instances cost

      • kinther@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 years ago

        I haven’t seen one yet. Disk usage this morning on lemmy.world was reported at about 4GB over 11 days (probably low usage). The 100GB drive would probably fill up in 275 days or so if usage did not increment. If it’s not redundant and dies, all that content is lost.

        So storage will be a huge issue for lemmy unless I’m missing something.

        • nwithan8@lemmy.world
          3·
          2 years ago

          100GB is practically nothing nowadays.

          There are people (myself included, not to brag) running home servers with literally hundreds of terabytes of data. At that ~0.3 GB/day number, I alone could host 3,500 years worth of data. Get some of those r/DataHoarders and r/HomeLab guys on here and Lemmy would never run out of space.