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?
Maybe they could place some sort of incentive for donations? My instant not-seriously-scrutinized thought would be to give perhaps some sort of badge or distinction if you make a donation and maybe another sort of distinction for the top 3 donators although I’m not thinking about any possible consequences such a system might have.
Yeah, badges of distinction are one of the reddit things that Lemmy is trying to get away from.
This system is closer to old message boards than Reddit.
What the hexbear instance has done is include a donation tally in the footer and occasionally promote featured posts calling for donations when they’re needed.