Its not a secret that no ads on lemmy, which makes the process more difficult paying for hosting to keep your instance only, so tell me!
How do you fund your lemmy instance? do you sell products through lemmy? Donations? how you convince people to donate to your instance? Do you sell subscriptions? how?
The biggest cost really isn’t hosting, because lemmy can easily be run on a VPS for less than $10/month. The biggest cost is moderator time, and they should be paid for if they’re running a good instance.
Right now at least, you can put donation links in your site sidebar, or possibly do funding drives via posts.
I pay for a VPS on Digital Ocean for $5 per month so I don’t even notice the cost of running one.
Sounds cool, i don`t know if you have plans for the future, and if there is a possibility that your instance will grow!
I don’t really have any plans. Would like to grow the instance to maybe 100 users but I don’t know how I’m going to do that.
Just to give you an idea why i need to know this. I’m very interested in launching lemmy instance i love this software, and of course i have no problem even paying $30 for hosting per month. But i’m looking for the future when my instance is growing and will need more computing power, so at least something small to help me cover the costs of the server.
Are you asking everyone about their lemmy instance? Or asking how lemmy.ml is funded?
Everyone about their lemmy instances! individuals who run lemmy for themselves
I want to know both
🇩🇪 i funt ze instentz on join-lemmy.org 🇩🇪
I guess wintermute is paying for the virtual machine.
I finance the vps from my own funds, there are no other plans.
thanks for that btw 🥰
For now, paying for a VPS is relatively affordable. But as was noted elsewhere, moderation is the real cost. Last week’s terrible antisemitism and racist trolling and spam is a case in point. It led me to raise signup effort (registration application etc). That has kind of eliminated local-instance spam by 99% and the random ones are from existing users, who we kick out as they post spam stuff.
The main problem now is in federating with instances that can be hijacked by such trolls and have their content propagated all over. Nothing we can do about that in so far as we want to maintain existing federation bonds. The moderation cost is still significant as we have to take them down manually.
In the end, I think this is an ideal set up for our instance. We are not after numbers. In fact, we want to have a small number of users as a sustainable path, and hopefully support other individuals and organizations spin up their instances.
I pay for hosting lemmy.ca myself. i just took it over from the previous admin, since they were unable to.
To clarify that comment - I handed lemmy.ca over to @smorks@lemmy.ca as I no longer have the time to run, maintain, and moderate it. The cost for me was negligible at this point - I had it sitting on a dedicated server that ran several other things.
I’m hosting sopuli.xyz on Hetzner’s VPS that is 6 €/month so funding the instance is mere pocket change. No need to mine cryptocurrency on users’ computers yet :D
If you don’t mind me asking, is it still this cheap?
Also, thanks for running that lemmy instance! I’m able to find the news I’m looking for there rather than reddit 😁
