Another important factor to note is it takes a fraction of hosting power to host lemmy vs something like reddit, because reddit does an insane amount of power hungry tracking in the background. Lemmy (and apps like jebora) don't collect anything, so don't need to constantly stream all that data to the main server instance
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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No Stupid Questions
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TIL that tracking takes a lot of power.
Is that you Huffman?
Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.
Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you're relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you're getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)
Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.
It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.
Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)
@sab What streaming services do you pay for? I'm all for supporting small indie studios, but Disney and the like can deal with me pirating their content.
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Alright, fair enough
I don't know the answer.
Neither do I. I just wrote this just so lemmy counts me as an active user
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At this point, even Reddit is not profitable.
As other people's said, profit is/should not be the driving force. However you should chip in every now and then towards the instance of your choosing. I have donated to lemmy.world and will do it again.
I see it as normal for the instance owners to have their costs completely covered and some extra on top for them for all the time spent.
it is more sustainable to pay for your small chunk of a network than to pay for a monolith that encompasses everything
i hope lemmy.world doesnt become too big for its own good and becomes to big to upkeep
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I know you probably have seen a lot of answers from others already and my answer would probably be the same as others (for obvious reasons) but I am going to answer anyway because you told me not to lurk. Please note that I am not an expert (or even somebody who knows much about business) so don't expect my answers to even be half correct.
If by profitable you mean "not making a loss" then probably yes as long as if there are enough donations to cover the expense of running the server.
But if by profitable you mean "making enough money to be sustainable long term" then my answer would be most likely not because it's not designed to make money (unlike ahem...certain platform)
Lemmy isn't profitable, and doesn't plan to be. It's not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it's designed to be an decentralized community running on P2P open source software. If you work in the web development or IT industry full time, you likely have the skills to set up an Instance of your own for little or no cost, even of its just a side hobby on your personal computer.
Yes, in a way this means we are the equivalent one of those massive 'miniature' train sets that adult hobbiests play with in their garage.
The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.
Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.
I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.
I'm not sure there is one answer here. I guess it all depends on the instance. Also consider that it's pretty early on, some instances might ask you money to join, others might ask for donations and yet others might show ads or be completely paid for by the hoster. Having a small instance doesn't necessarily need to cost a lot.
Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
I suspect we may also see more instances focused on very specific topics to keep operating cost down.
Would that make you lose your comment history and username? For example I needed to create separate accounts for Beehaw and here. It’s similar to using different forums in the late 90s/early 00s in that way it seems.
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