Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Its up to individual instances and apps to decide how to keep themselves running and its up to the users that form around those instances to decide if they like that chosen form, eg donations, subscriptions, advertisements
The benefits for users being they can just move somewhere else if they don’t like their choice
The difficulty for server hosts will be keeping up with demand and being able to afford to continue
Unfortunately this means that the instance you have chosen right now might not be here forever
Lemmy isn’t profitable, and doesn’t plan to be. It’s not designed to be a moneymaking enterprise, it’s desigmed 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.
Perhaps I’m totally wrong as I’m new around here but isn’t the whole point that’s it is decentralized and servers are administrated by user groups? There is supposed to be little to no monetary ensentive.
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.
I’m donating $5 to the Lemmy devs and $5 to Lemmy.world currently on patreon.
