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’m alright with centralisation personally, as long as it’s easy enough to move off of. If Lemmy or Kbin or whatever starts being evil, you could always branch off your own organisation and still have the same content fairly seamlessly through federation. (And yes, planning to remove federation counts as evil and hopefully would cause an exodus beforehand)
Because Lemmy is open source, the only danger is a fork that removes compatibility. We’ve already dealt with this early on in the project with hexbear forking off (for good reasons, that instance has a lot of added features like pronoun flair and emotes). But that’s coming to an end soon as hexbear is working on upstreaming back to Lemmy’s main branch and should be open to federation this time next week.
Isn’t Reddit based on FOSS? Or was anyways?