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?
Since it’s distributed, the cost doesn’t even compare to a centralized instance. It’s really hard to say how much it would cost to host everyone across the fediverse, but because of decentralization, it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to achieve.
ActivityPub consumes a lot of resources, so the cost for each instance owner will still be high
It’s not a problem on mastodon, really, so, I don’t see why it would be here!
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.