Lemmy

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

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How is Lemmy going to make money? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 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.

[–] [email protected] 11 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.

[–] [email protected] 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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they're using, and the Lemmy devs?

Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?

Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API

As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of active users, and none of them are ad supported. Donations generally are capable of paying the operating expenses, as long as the staff is halfway decent at creating a space that people appreciate.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I’m happy to donate and will do, just like buying an app really if once per year.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they're using, and the Lemmy devs?

Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?

Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?

Also, ads would only be useful when hitting the actual instance site in a browser, many (or most) users will use some sort of app I imagine.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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