Mastodawn

ryan213 Jul 1, 2023

So how long until the Fediverse is monetized?

https://lemmy.world/post/919955

So how long until the Fediverse is monetized? - Lemmy.world

I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead? Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.

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donchez Jul 1, 2023

As soon as Lemmy instances are unsustainable out of pure interest for the concept of the Fediverse. I doubt there will be subscriptions, first it’ll be donations, and then some instances may have ads. It’s an inevitable that both will happen (either on the same instance, or some instances opting for donations to stay up, and others opting for ads to stay up). No one can run the servers necessary for this platform out of pure charity; the bill for the Fediverse is going to be due someday, and it has to be paid.

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douglasg14b

This is inevitable as well.

A user base as large as Reddit has an infra bill in the tens of millions. And that’s mature, with cost optimization at all levels to reduce compute, static content costs, more effective caching…etc

Lemmy instances are probably an order of magnitude more expensive to run on a per-user basis, at least.

This means the bill for the Lemmy fediverse if it had the active user base of reddit could be conceivably be near or over a collective $100mill/y with the majority of that just being a result of fragmented, high cost, infrastructure running a (at scale) low performance application.