Asklemmy

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How are we going to pay for all this? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Blockchain has been used previously (see dogetipbot) in a similar concept and worked well.

Since tips would be given at the discretion of users finding certain comments particularly good, a bot would only be able to abuse the system by creating good comments.

I have seen of many instances not being funded sufficiently through donations. If the level of user donations is able to cover only 50% of operation costs for an instance, if monthly upkeep is say $60, then it is reasonable for an owner to subsidize the rest. But, as lemmy (and consequently each community) grows in popularity, a 50% coverage of operational costs is simply not sustainable. That is, without a tactic such as Wikipedia's notorious pity-ware ad banners.

Providing an alternative method of funding could assist instance owners to keep the community running.