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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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
Speaking as someone who totally doesn’t understand federation (but totally does get servers being overloaded) - I can completely see why they all joined what appears to be the primary instance. I did. I really struggled to work out which server to join and had to wade through a few that had their own special rules (eg “no creating communities here” - idr which one that was tho).
I ended up joining lemm.ee simply because it seems like a nice generic server set up to do general stuff with that wasn’t lemmy.ml. Is that a good choice? idk.
I had a similar problem grasping mastodon (actually the reason I didn’t really use it in the end).
Lemmy servers need to work more like Counterstrike or TF2 or WoW servers (edit: or IRC servers - that’s probably a better comparison tbh), where you might want to join a specific server with its own personality, but most people probably don’t care and are more interested in whether it performs well and is likely to be around a while. I also think some simple things like making the server less prominent in the UI and not making local communities the default view would help loads with people not feeling like they’re less because they’re not on the primary instance.
Edit: LMAO except I didn’t. I posted using the account I’d made on lemmy.ml but decided not to use. Lemmying is hard, yo.
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.
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
when you donate money, you’re not funding wikipedia’s operating costs. wikipedia itself is self sufficient. what you’re funding instead is the wikimedia foundation- which is set up to not receive grants but to give them.
the drives are misleading, to say the least
If it is not funded through user donations, how is it self sufficient? Genuinely curious.
