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?
Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That’s the beauty of lemmy’s decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn’t incur any additional cost to whatever they’re already paying for internet access.
There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they’re driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.
___Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
I don’t host any instances myself, but I have experience with web hosting in general. Yes, the hardware will need to scale vertically with more activity, but I don’t know what lemmy’s anticipated load thresholds are.
I would guess a decent i7 with an SSD and 16GB+ RAM would handle lemmy quite comfortably for a good while. So the expense isn’t entirely trivial, but it’s nothing compared to a centralized service with hundreds of millions of regular users.