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?
Everyone? At once and next week? It would just die.
Kbin.social had a nice post (check their meta community for it; it’s technically a different software, but still), how the instance went from costing $2-3 a month to 1000. And that’s a tiny fraction of reddit.
Development needs to advance just to better handle current user counts, there’s a lot of things that simply never were an issue when only a few hundred users were active.
The way it will work, is probably donations, maybe some very few paid instances.
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Storage doesn’t distribute, though. Every instance needs to save everything. I run my own instance, so the way it works, is that I save everything anyone posts in any community I subscribed to. Permanently, by default.
Bandwidth, sure, mostly. But storage will only grow. And massive amounts of instances will also add issues over time, unlike something like XMPP/Jabber, the fediverse is more of a hubs and spokes model.