If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There’s plenty of ways to make money without VC.
Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don’t know…
Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that
I’ve always dreamed of, and now with even more Fediverse usage it might be easier to push, to have local municipal governments fund simple sites in the states as part of a pretty standard practice of creating community spaces, and so that local governments can have a site to host accounts without the chance of being censored by big tech in the future.
I empathize with this view - but I doubt this will ever happen. Ignoring the user training bits, and the legal bits (who is a mod, how do they do stuff), you need to have someone dedicated to fighting this though the IT/Security gauntlet. Now keep in mind im private sector (so it’s slightly different) - but we in IT generally have dimm views of hosting WebApps.
All that said. Once one local gov does it the potential for it to spread radically increases.
They do get funding from NLNet
Yes! :)