First post, honest question.
Who will pay for lemmy? There were a few sites that started sometime back because they were fed up with something about reddit but eventually they all crashed because they had no funds. How will lemmy be different?
Lemmy is going to be in the “let’s see how this works” period for a while
My instance has a thread for costings/donations, we’re months ahead.
Per person, it’s honestly crazy cheap.
Awesome, that’s the first actual number figure I’ve seen for hosting costs. Mind if I ask how many users that is? I’ve no concept of ‘how much is suitable’ - I realise that things will change as Lemmy scales, but I’ve no idea whether we’re talking a couple of quid a year per user at the moment, or per month, or what.
I hope someone more knowledgeable and patient will come and provide a more detailed reply but the gist of it is that Lemmy is paid by the admins of each instance.
Lemmy is a framework, not a specific site. It allows anyone to setup an “instance” (like an individual lemmy-type site/server) and communicate to each other. If some admin has limited funds, they can limit the size of their instances to keep the costs down. If another admin has deeper pockets, , then they can make a large instance with thousands of users.
For example, the framework allows admins to limit the size of uploaded images. So a small instance can limit the size of pictures to 1 mb to save storage space and bandwidth.
Edit: As for the development of the framework itself, it’s an open source project. It’s built on the goodwill of volunteer developers. The lead ones are very left learning (to avoid flame war) and might keep supporting it just to throw a middle finger to the big greedy corps. They gotta eat though, so donations are certainly going to be welcome.
Edit 2: I wonder how bad the userbase would react to someone using lemmy for a setup like that of animanch.com. The admin of that site keeps a fairly active public forum that he uses to farm content to post on his monetized blog, which in turn supports the cost of said forum.
Adding onto this, it’s fairly cheap and easy to host a Lemmy instance if you have any amount of experience with using a VPS.
A friend of mine is hosting her instance for a group of friends on a $5/month Linode instance. From what we see of the stats it should be able to scale up to many times more users and activity than what it has now, and that’s based on the current state of the Lemmy codebase. There are additional performance optimizations being worked on that will help reduce those loads, and thus costs, even further
Also donations: https://www.patreon.com/dessalines
I also remember reading something about the devs being sponsored by some EU project or something like that.
The devs receives funding from nlnet foundation
In the case of this instance (lemmy.fmhy.ml) it appears to be self funded by the admins
Q: Can I donate?
A: We appreciate that people want to support us, but we never have and never will accept donations. We maintain this project because its fun and we want to help others, not make money.
https://www.reddit.com/r/FREEMEDIAHECKYEAH/comments/xrxen7/faq_support_thread/
However currently for others instances donations seem to be the primary method of funding (beehaw has a nice cost breakdown)
Edit FMHY link to beehaw post:
https://lemmy.fmhy.ml/post/509214
Beehaw direct link to post
Good answers here, but to summarize some points and elaborate on others:
- Ultimately it’s the admins that choose to stand up an instance who are responsible for that instance’s costs.
- The costs are well within what many hobbiests can afford, so some admins aren’t asking for help, but many instances have donation links in the sidebar or pinned posts.
- The developers are also self-funded, and for many it’s a full time job; they also have donation links, and I personally think this should be a high priority for people who are able to contribute and want to see Lemmy grow.
- Yes, a well-funded outfit/person can stand up a big instance with more resources than others, with intent to somehow turn it into a business (e.g, selling ads). That’s fine; no one has to go there if it’s not worth it, and other instances can defederate if they cause actual problems.
I did a one-time donation to my instance admin and another to the developers for now. If I stick with this, like I think I will, I’ll probably do some monthly thing.
It says the developers are self funded but they are working all day on Lemmy it seems. So they are unemployed and working on Lemmy?
The costs to push data are fairly trivial at the moment. Where peertube will struggle due to technical barriers (mostly just storage/duplication), text and images are just not that taxing.
Let me assure you whole it sorts itself there’s no shortage of people throughout the history of new cool things who want to host and play with them. We’re probably headed to maintain those through foundations/donations.
The cool part is just like email you shouldn’t have to be permanently synchronized, meaning you could run an instance you collect like an email client at near 0 cost to anyone.
