Asklemmy

In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we'll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit's costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

Don't forget to make a donation to your instance if you love it. For most of us it's a bit early but I give my 10 EUR per year to my Mastodon admin. Also, if you can choose instance ran by a non profit rather than a person as it ease the whole donation mechanism and give you the right to check where your membership due go.

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.

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

The distributed nature of Lemmy should make things more manageable. Personally, I'm running an instance on a dedicated machine I already pay for, so it's not costing me anything unless storage skyrockets. Many other instance hosts are also hobbyists that don't mind covering the costs, and may take some form of donations locally on their sidebars.

There probably should be a built-in feature for instance admins to enable a local donation button to contribute to their costs, though. While Lemmy is fairly resource-efficient, larger instances are eventually going to require pretty beefy VMs to keep up with the traffic, image uploads, etc. I could see some instances randomly vanishing when their owners can't/don't keep up with their bills (which would force users over to other instances), but ideally if any instance owners can't afford to cover it, they hand control over to another community member to pick it up.

this works on the same principals as fidonet, UseNet, email, etc. These protocols are more like fundamental services. The idea behind these was that instead of running a bunch if proprietary garbage you would run things that support A LOT of standard protocols. Why? Because NO ONE should be allowed to own our communications but ourselves.

The corps did not build these networks, we did. Software will improve over time, OSS shows the way.

I think the biggest cost will be image/video storage. The text takes very little space in today's standards. The good thing is that symmetric fibre internet connections are becoming more common so it may be possible for members of the instance to contribute unused disk space to help with its image/video storage. This plus limiting the image/video sizes (and maybe forbidding video uploads altogether) will allow the instances to scale with user count.

As everyone else has already said that's a very good question, one that doesn't necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I'd point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn't unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we've had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster's expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like "federated" instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone's data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn't abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I'd guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren't people donating to open source projects... and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don't wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.

We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance

I signed up for the lemmy.ml Patreon and am happy to support an open, federated site like this. I'd never pay for Reddit Gold, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, or any of those other nasty pay-to-win commericalized things but I'll pay to keep an open platform from implementing stupid "premium" bullshit.

Reddit has over 2,000 employees most of whom are doing bullshit nobody using the site actually needs or wants, it's possible to run a lot leaner than that. Like Reddit itself used to, before they started burning hundreds of millions trying to compete with every other social media site at once instead of being Reddit

I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.

Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.

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.

Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.

There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.___

Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit's whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They're not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn't even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn't scale linearly, there's only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn't possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn't make sense either.

I suspect reddit's reported uprofitablity isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.

sell checkmarks like Tumbler.

for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.

By not all ending up on the same server.

The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.

So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.

Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It's not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.

With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn't. Meaning there's fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn't succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.

@psylancer If you got 100 million users so that it's costing 400 million dollars a year, then ideally you need one million servers with 100 users on each. They need to all pass around a hat between their 100 users to raise the 50 dollars in server costs a month.

Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:

1. a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
2. not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!

Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.

This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.