this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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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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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago
[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What would the checkmark mean?

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

Just that you support the lemmy community.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don't really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn't just a social media, it's a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Really nice merch, with small logos on. Think how the LTT stealth stuff is.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We ask u/spez for the money ...

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Given that lemmy is an OSS project and decentralized, it draws a lot of people with knowledge and resources. You could easily host your own instance for your friends, to have them connect to other instances. And i think there are enough people in these communities that have some left over server resources to host their own instances.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I got an old server from work sitting around at home doing nothing. Seriously thinking about hosting my own instance on it

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (6 children)

edit: misposted comment - see bizarre explanation below

  • westworld - lovely visuals
  • alias - excellent theme music
  • bojack horseman
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[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

IMO it sounds like that some AI corporation should host their own instance(s). They only pay for server and maintenance costs, while community does the rest and they have their data.

Would be best of both worlds, isn't it? Once they become greedy, we are f*cked again, just like Reddit did...

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much "gold" was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.

We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

This is a great idea.

[โ€“] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

There already is a question similar to this. You can find lots of ideas there :)

[โ€“] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

By not asking the same question every single day.

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