Asklemmy

44258 readers

1191 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

233

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]

214 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 36 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (5 children)

I suspect reddit's reported uprofitablity isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.

[–] Confuzzeled 10 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I read they have 2000 staff members, why so many? The moderation is done by volunteers, just seems excessive.

[–] fubo 19 points 2 years ago

why so many?

Engineers to develop chat and new ad features.
Sales & customer support (for advertisers, not users).
PR & media relations.
Executive junket planning & goat molestation.

... yeah, no idea.

Somehow not fixing the underscore bug that breaks most links to Wikipedia.

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

We don't even know for a fact if they are truly unprofitable or not, it's not like anyone here has reviewed their books.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

No, but it would be extra stupid for Spez to say that if it weren't true because it could affect investments and draw legal action.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Honestly, who knows at this point? I've seen some horrible business/legal decisions happen over the last 5-10 years. Some people will practically set themselves on fire just for the chance to make higher profit. Hypothetically, this certainly wouldn't be the first case of a sketchy business drawing bad legal attention to itself, not by a long shot. I have seen a lot of businesses shut because of this type of behaviour.

The other lies from Spez about the developers certainly don't help his case, either. That's another fantastic way for Reddit to open themselves up to potential legal issues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 years ago

Back in the day, Reddit used to show how much of their server costs were being covered by Reddit gold revenue alone. It was basically always enough to cover daily usage.

[–] venoft 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Their hosting costs also rose exponentially when they decided to host their own videos and pictures.

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

Which they could have locked behind Reddit Gold or some pay-tier. /shrug