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?
I remember reading that the cost per user of running a Mastodon server really drops as the server attracts more users. Yes, you need bigger servers, but not that much. I remember one server in particular sharing their finances and it was around 0.001$ per user per month. (Less than 1 cent!) I would guess that it’s similar for Lemmy and Kbin and other Fediverse apps.
Srever running with donations seems like the best way forward.