Asklemmy

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How are we going to pay for all this? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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?

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:

a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!

Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.

This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The good thing is: Free development can an does happen (see Linux!). Hosting seems to be the main issue. An ideal solution would be each instance having a capacity limiter, which automatically redirects a % of content to other instances if it becomes to much. Is this possible?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's a bit complicated. Account handling is by nature of federation, linked to your source instance. There is discussion on GitHub about moving account export up the chain just to help people move from lemmy.ml to other instances.

Keep that discussion pinned and if you want you can see if you can help with a PR if you're able.

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