Asklemmy

@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.

I'd love hosting a chunk on my anyways online Linux box (and if it was easy I could put up another junk box or two (like i3-i5 8GB 256GB-512GB/1-4TB) if it fits on a 1Gb ethernet line, but I admit I don't have the time (/energy) for all the stuff around (I'd do backups) especially if the hardware breaks or there are troll infestations etc.

Before the whole world migrates to Lemmy, maybe we could hold on by teaming up in some way.

Maybe my shard should be about doing just that, and hopefully people wanting to set up 'lemmys' could gather and share experiences and help.

Thoughts?

The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.

So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.

Each instance funds itself. Some might try ads, but as of now, most are just funded by donations.

I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.

Are ads forbidden?

I would like to join a cooperatively owned instance.

I have been tempted to join cosocial.ca, however I don't care for microblogging (Mastodon) as much as something forum-like such as a Lemmy instance.

I think the price is spread out across multiple generous people that generously host instances. I think it really depends on how much members there are. From what I heard my instance is 25 $ a month. Another instance I was in on Mastodon cost a few hundreds bucks to run. This is why it is good to help out your fellow admins. On the other hand, lemmy and other fediverse software are open source, so they don't really have to pay for developpers. Also the scope of what lemmy or Mastodon do is considerably smaller that Facebook, Twitter and the likes. Facebook isn't just a social media, it's a spying engine and an ad recommendation platform, Lemmy and mastodon are just social medias, so of course it costs less to do.

I'm running a barebones server for myself and a few communities (not many subs yet) which will run for less than a Starbucks coffee a month... (Assuming I don't need more storage space... Lemmy seems pretty light. The main servers are gonna carry the load unfortunately... Beehaw.org had a transparency post about financials as of about a week ago they said something that their instance was costing like 50-75ish a month of I recall.

Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit's whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They're not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn't even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn't scale linearly, there's only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn't possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn't make sense either.