Asklemmy

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So how does lemmy make money? (self.asklemmy)

submitted 1 year ago by _danny to c/[email protected]

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I'm not seeing any ads, and these servers certainly have a cost.... So is this place entirely donation based, or what?

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[–] trifictional 34 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It’s non profit by default, the very thing that social media needs.

People who run Lemmy servers do it at their own cost. That’s not to say they can’t run ads or choose other ways to become profitable. The big difference between a lemmy instance and something like Reddit is that anyone can start a new instance if the current one goes to shit. If the admins do something the users REALLY don’t like, they can migrate to another instance way more easily than switching platforms.

Reddit is counting on the effort of switching platforms being too high for lemmy to gain traction. They are wrong.

The developers do it for free, which is common in the open source community. There will always be volunteers to build the software and donors to support them.

[–] WarlordSdocy 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I have wondered how migrating instances would work. Would anything come with me to a new account on a new instance or is it still similar to moving from Reddit where I'm starting over?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Mastodon has a way to migrate so it's possible with ActivityPub. There's an open issue for migraine instances that wasn't closed so I assume it's planned. I have no idea if it's being actively worked on though.

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

It's an open issue on GitHub, and was featured in the recent dev blog:

At the same time, we are seeing lots of requests to implement major new features, such as migration between instances, or combining similar communities. As described above, we are completely overloaded with work, and definitely won’t have time to implement these in the near future. If there is a feature you want to see implemented, you will likely need to work on it yourself, or find someone who can.

So no, currently you can't move. You can only create a new account on another instance, and start using that instead. At least you're still on the same platform.

Given the popularity of the issue, I would assume it will find a solution. But given no one is assigned to it yet, we probably still have no people willing to work on it.

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