I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?
Until you get into image/video/file hosting, it’s very cheap. So long as people are ok with off-site storage usage, then it shouldn’t cost much at all.
Merch is a pretty big risk, or at least was when I was doing it for bands. I know there are solutions for on demand creation now that might be more feasible
Honestly the images aren’t TOO bad, or not as bad as you’d think. I have 160GB right now and pay less than $2/mo for it.
Of course with more active users that’ll scale quickly at which point I’d probably tighten up on the upload limits.
I’m also using Cloudflare R2, I could move to something like Backblaze (which I already use for backups) and could possibly lower that.
