I think this may be the wrong question. I am the administrator of a reverse engineered PS3 video game server, so it’s illegal for me to make a profit or any kind of revenue or donations from that platform. However, I maintain it for thousands of users simply because I and others enjoy it and want it to exist. That’s not a sustainable model for a business or for running something as gigantic as reddit, but it’s what I want and enjoy, and for right now it’s affordable, and I’m happy with that.

It doesn’t have to be profitable. Especially for people that already have computers running 24/7 and good Internet, a Lenny server is just another process they run on their machine. Admin/mod duties would probably be the hardest part.

Lemmy isn’t profitable, and doesn’t plan to be. It’s not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it’s designed to be an decentralized community running on P2P open source software. If you work in the web development or IT industry full time, you likely have the skills to set up an Instance of your own for little or no cost, even of its just a side hobby on your personal computer.

Yes, in a way this means we are the equivalent one of those massive ‘miniature’ train sets that adult hobbiests play with in their garage.

I’m donating $5 to the Lemmy devs and $5 to Lemmy.world currently on patreon.

Any Lemmy/fediverse instance could come up with a localized monetization scheme for people that browse through it, but it wouldn’t affect other instances (or if they were injecting ads into feeds, they’ll just get blocked by everyone else), but for the most part, it’s got more of an IRC server vibe, no monetization needed when community volunteers are plentiful and the barrier to entry is low. Eventually ‘big boys’ like Lemmy.world will want a more formal and reliable way of paying for their server and bandwidth needs beyond primarily unsolicited donations ($ and time) by volunteers.

These are not profit generating services, they are community services. For now.

Lemmy has so far made $0 total profit. So that makes them substantially more profitable than Reddit.

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One of the points of federated and decentralized social media is that there’s no need to profit. The concept is that communities are built by individuals instead of a central institutions and the communal gain is what incentivizes folks to host servers and participate. I see it as a similar ecosystem as the open source software community who constantly gives everything away for free because it serves the common good, enables faster innovation and widens the spread of knowledge that makes everyone more successful/efficient at the end of the day. If these decentralized social networks can provide the same level of benefit as Reddit, I.e. people adding “Reddit” to their search queries to get first hand answers, I think that’s the singularity point at which people will realize giant social network corporations are completely unnecessary. I can’t wait. Seems inevitable to me because the entire business model of the current centralized networks is unsustainable - part of the reason you see Reddit making such drastic moves regarding their API or Meta investing in anything and everything outside of social media or Twitter throwing unnecessary digital products at the wall and hoping people pay for some of them. Once decentralized social networks are mainstream the ad target pool is going to be greatly affected and these companies will collapse under their own weight if they haven’t pivoted to something else.

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I think it’s more like a hobby, it doesn’t necessarily NEED to be profitable as long as you and other people enjoy it and contribute to it. So far I’m loving it and it really feels like a breath of fresh air compared to reddit, especially without the karma system

In addition to all of the answers here, development costs for protocols like ActivityPub can be partially offset by grants by organizations like W3C that work to build open standards.

The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.

Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they’re linked together.

I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there’s generally been some way to eat the cost.

The funny thing is that not all human endeavours actually need to be profitable for them to exist. It’s perfectly fine and normal for people to be generous and provide services for the community for nothing in return and for some of those in the community to help out too.