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?
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.