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 suspect reddit’s reported uprofitablity isn’t due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
I read they have 2000 staff members, why so many? The moderation is done by volunteers, just seems excessive.
Engineers to develop chat and new ad features.
Sales & customer support (for advertisers, not users).
PR & media relations.
Executive junket planning & goat molestation.
… yeah, no idea.
Somehow not fixing the underscore bug that breaks most links to Wikipedia.
We don’t even know for a fact if they are truly unprofitable or not, it’s not like anyone here has reviewed their books.
There are lot of businesses that are “unprofitable” after they pay for “business expenses”. The line if what constitutes a “business expense” is (intentionally) fuzzy. It may be a lot if luxurious shit for high up execs, because they need to appear to live a certain lifestyle to further the business. Then a modest salary. If it is a business expense they claim it as a loss and they pay less in taxes.
Unprofitable doesn’t mean shit, really. You can make the numbers look like whatever you want. Also /u/spez is a known fucking liar.
Yeah. Ideally nobody is, technically ‘profitable’ - cause you have to pay taxes on profits.
No, but it would be extra stupid for Spez to say that if it weren’t true because it could affect investments and draw legal action.
Honestly, who knows at this point? I’ve seen some horrible business/legal decisions happen over the last 5-10 years. Some people will practically set themselves on fire just for the chance to make higher profit. Hypothetically, this certainly wouldn’t be the first case of a sketchy business drawing bad legal attention to itself, not by a long shot. I have seen a lot of businesses shut because of this type of behaviour.
The other lies from Spez about the developers certainly don’t help his case, either. That’s another fantastic way for Reddit to open themselves up to potential legal issues.
Back in the day, Reddit used to show how much of their server costs were being covered by Reddit gold revenue alone. It was basically always enough to cover daily usage.
Hookers and blow, right? It’s always hookers and blow
Spez is definitely on something, that’s for sure.
I’m gonna open my own instance, with hookers and blackjack! Well forget the instance.
Their hosting costs also rose exponentially when they decided to host their own videos and pictures.
Which they could have locked behind Reddit Gold or some pay-tier. /shrug
Any “good” corporation is supposed to be “unprofitable”, i.e. investing all their income into future growth.
And if you believe that the money you invest in your business will outperform usual loan interest rates, then it also makes sense to take out loans for even more growth, since then loan interests will be paid by future profits that compounds from the growth you get by taking out the loan.
Of course, usually that doesn’t work, so the CEOs and whoever tries to cash out before the eventual crash.
Ponzi-esque
Also, as long as you aren’t, technically ‘profitable’, you don’t pay taxes.
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Yea, lemmy is volunteer run, so most of the cost is going to be hosting it would seem, unlike reddit who have to pay for employees/office space(?)/legal fees/ect. I would imagine that the larger instances will have the most problems paying for hosting while the small ones will probably be fairly cheap.
Yeah cocaine and hookers don’t come cheap