Excited to get off reddit, excited to see lemmy grow; growth is expensive. How is this getting paid for? - eviltoast

Curious how lemmy servers are paid for. Is it donation?

  • Nyanix@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    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.

      • kratoz29@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • linearchaos@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

          • quixotic120@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            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

            • insomniac@vlemmy.net
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              1 year ago

              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.

        • ribboo@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.

      • hinterlufer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          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.