Curious how lemmy servers are paid for. Is it donation?
As others have already said … donations.
Something to keep in mind though is how cheap per user this whole thing can be.
Here’s the admin of mastodon.world and lemmy.world outlining their financials: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
They’re actually making money off of donations.
And if you look at the monthly costs (~500 Euro / month) and their Monthly Active Users (~35k), that turns out to be ~0.2 Euro per year. Without a need for profits, marketing, bloated features etc, the actual cost of social media per user per year is something we’d all be willing to pay (IMO).
Now obviously there aren’t salaries in that calculation. Moderation, admin-ing etc are all done voluntarily AFAIK, just like sub-reddit mods were on Reddit. Though, again, if someone wants moderating/admin-ing to be a side hustle of some sort, we all don’t need to donate much for there to be actual livable salaries (or supplementary salaries) in this kind of work. In fact, I think it’d be cool if social media went in that direction where organising popular and nice community spaces was just a thing you could do for a living with the skill and talent it requires being of recognised value.
Lemmy.world, as an instance, has 7 admins and 25k Monthly Active Users. If each donated $5 per year, that’s ~17k per year for each admin. Not a full salary, but maybe not bad for a part-time side hustle!
Reading this kind of made me see the way that Lemmy gets bigger and better than Reddit. If there’s money to be made here, even a small amount, people will migrate over.
Crazy what can happen when you don’t need to pay back investors and hire teams of developers to optimize ad revenue. Not to take away from the heroic development efforts that have gone in to the backend and all of the apps that are popping up. It’s cool what we can accomplish when you cut out the venture capitalists.
Yup, paid for by donations 😊 server requirements aren’t super high since it’s primarily functioning as link aggregation and doesn’t have to host a lot per server.
Makes you wonder about reddit api pricing…
Playing the devil’s advocate here… They also (badly) host videos so maybe that’s something… But for that pricing, they are just greedy fucks.
The majority of their expenditures are salary and rent. They’ve hired on a shit ton of investors ‘friends’ as upper MGMT and pay them loads to do shit work.
The API price is calculated by what they expect to pull in from ad revenue, which is insanely overinflated to make the bottom line look good for IPO.
Give 'em a couple months, maybe a quarter. When ad-rev is crap, they’ll lay off another load and send spez packing.
They have 2000 staff their salary expenditures must be insane
They’re clearly burning through VC until they IPO with the hopes that once they IPO they will then be propped up financially by shareholder investment. It worked for Facebook and twitter a decade ago so it must work now right? Never mind that Facebook had much more viable revenue streams and that twitter stagnated and is now tanking (tbf that’s kind of elons fault)
They’ll chug along as always longer than that though unless fidelity cuts their valuation significantly again. They have a lot of inertia. Ad buys seem impacted but impressions don’t although I haven’t followed things super closely. Reddit has a shitload of casual users who will check it every day and simply don’t care about the admins or site drama
2,000 employees with an average salary of 100k (which I pulled out of my ass but probably on the low end) is 200 million a year just on payroll.
I’d love to see that honestly.
Can’t remember the exact figure, but they calculate on each user bringing in like $0.5 every three months or so. That’s how the Apollo creater came to the conclusion of them marking up their API prices by a 1000% or similar. So the cost of each user should not be much higher than that.
It basically comes down to being greedy and really wanting to get rid of 3rd party apps.
What if we someday get video tools?
I doubt it, hosting video is quite expensive and resource intensive. I’m guessing the direction would rather be to implement proper video embedding and host on third party servers.
Can we get away with limiting APIs and greedy companies by taking this route?
The great thing about the nature of Federation seems to be that additional services or instances that host videos don’t have to impact the current instances. .world or .ml could just say “we will never host video content” and users won’t have to make a new account to see the video content that another instance may provide.
I have an onlyfans for my feet pics that finances all of it
OMG disgusting, please advise me of the link as to avoid such atrocities
Yes most intances are paid by donations. Mostly the admins are paying their bills
You like your instance and want to give something back? Donate 🌞
Just throw $2 a month toward Lemmy on Patreon! Well worth it.
What are tanks tankies? What’s another alternative to Reddit?
It’s described in the link, “red fascists”, they support “”“communist”“” authoritarian regimes like the CCP and Russia.
Kbin is a good alternative which shares content with Lemmy.
I’m definitely not disagreeing with you, but Lemmy has grown so large since the original “tankies” started Lemmy.ml that I don’t think it is really an issue for the larger community. I’ve only been here for a month or so but I have not seen many (if any) communistic related posts on the feeds, and if they are trying to spread their leftist messages they are not doing a very good job of it.
I have found Lemmy.world to be the most active platform, so I wanted to help out with server costs, thus the $2 per month. I have also donated to Ernest at Kbin and the Beehaw folks as well. I’m not going back to Reddit, so I want these communities to thrive and feel I need to pitch in the cost of a Latte every month to help out. Having said that, if I ever get the feeling that I am donating to some authoritarian cause I will stop donating immediately.
I just wanted to make sure people knew that their money could go to tankies.
You said you were giving to “Lemmy” on patreon, not Lemmy.world so I assumed it was the devs.
Thanks. Do you have their Opencollective link?
In addition to all the talk about donations here, it’s worth pointing out that instead of the multi-million dollar infrastructure costs of bigger outfits like Reddit, the costs for running a single Lemmy instance are well within the abilities of many hobbiests. Some may not even ask for donations.
We should keep the developers funded because, as I understand it, this is a full time job for many of them. And I’ve donated to my instance because I don’t think they expected the amount of growth and troubleshooting they’ve have to do with the Reddit surge, but it’s unclear how much will be needed going forward.
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I’m donating $5 to mastodonworld and $5 to the lemmy devs per month. It’s not much, but at least I’m not the product.
