WanderLemmy is CEO-proof. After Digg, Reddit and Twitter, that term should be a thing
RobOne thing that’ll need serious consideration:
I feel like it’s inevitable that Lemmy will get an advertisement module that admins can enable. Alternative monetisation methods can also work, such as subscriptions. But users will have to realise that servers aren’t free.
If you’re an admin for a small community and are willing to carry the burden: great. If you’re hosting a community that can support itself by donations: also great. But sooner or later we’ll need some ways to make servers sustainable.
(Not a fan of advertisements and would prefer to be a paying user, but as Lemmy takes off we shouldn’t look down on admins trying to mitigate their expenses).
How are fediverse admins currently funding their instances?
Self funding or donations
Ok, what kind of web hosting tier do you need in order to have the functionality needed to host an instance? I was fiddling with infinityfree and found that there are all sorts of minor functionality you need beyond just a catchy name in a domain that won't have a bad reputation to host an instance. I mean, besides electricity costs, labour and some old hardware you have lying around to use as a server, how much is that hosting expected to cost?
That's a good question that I'm unqualified to answer but I'm sure that [email protected] is a good resource for this.
Self-hosting - SLRPNK
Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware. Also check out: - Homebrewserver.club [https://homebrewserver.club/] - XMPP chat [xmpp:[email protected]?join]
If you wanted to self host Lemmy is very lightweight. The general consensus is you could get a cheap virtual host for $5-10/mo
That would cover yourself and a few friends. Now, if Lemmy were to really get popular your database would grow in size so youay have to get more storage later but it's overall very inexpensive to do it yourself.
That said, major instances like Lemmy.world could charge their users $1-2/mo and probably be fine (this is napkin math). Long story short nothing is free, even if it's relatively inexpensive. We need to create a community that is willing to pitch in a few cents for freedom. I don't think that's too much to ask, otherwise the ad model comes into play and the place goes to shit.
I'm OK if it becomes a paid service and can block robots and spiders.
°˖✧ ipha ✧˖°Beehaw was running on a 96€/month VPS and temporarly upped it to 336$/month to handle the reddit implosion.
Ooh, that's less than 5c/user/month, this can totally work without overloading with ads.
TroyHell, that is like one impression per user per month on Adsense. You could put a single unobtrusive text ad on top and probably pay for your server