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 think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don’t really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn’t just a social media, it’s a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.
Yup. On Facebook/Twitter the product isn’t the content, its a whole shitload of agregated personal data of the users and advertisements that use said data to target the users, so its only natural that these companies would be spending ludicrous amounts of money finding new ways to collect and parse that data.