Asklemmy

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

submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years 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] 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@psylancer If you got 100 million users so that it's costing 400 million dollars a year, then ideally you need one million servers with 100 users on each. They need to all pass around a hat between their 100 users to raise the 50 dollars in server costs a month.

[–] bobaduk 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Seems like storage is the cost prohibitive part. Search is going to be difficult, too. I wonder whether the model there might be community supported shared services. A bunch of instances could jointly run an elasticsearch cluster or Algolia instance and charge for API access to cover costs.

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

I wonder if the storage costs could be reduced, over the long term anyway, by having a setting to automatically delete anything older than a certain amount of time, configurable by the owners of a given instance. So an instance with ample funding or good hardware could disable it, and one that has enough drive space for about 3 years worth of posts could set that length of time for how long something lasts. Probably also would want a way for an instance admin to mark a posts as permanent and exempt from deletion. Would be a shame to lose that older content, but if reddit is any indication, anything people want to see again will likely get reposted anyway, and it would be preferable to losing an instance to rising storage costs. I imagine it might also make search a little better by having less to look through, though tbh I'm not sure how search algorithms work so I don't know how much that would help them if at all.