For me it feels like breaking up with someone after many years. At the same time, I feel a bit dirty mentioning the name in the post title.

    • Lemmy is opensource, you can see and get a copy of the source code here. https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy There’s no development cost because all developers are volunteers at this stage.

      For each instance that depends on the admins running that individual instance. The instance I use is being sponsored by a NZ company that are providing the admin’s a free virtual server to host on.

    • I have no idea. I’m sure we’ll figure that out along the way. At first it will probably be out of pocket from thousands of homelab hobbiests.

      Maybe eventually they could implement something like gilding that Reddit had. I’m sure gilding alone could fund a lot of servers. When you take out the millions of dollars the share holders were taking it properly didn’t take much money to run all of Reddit.

      • Nah, that’s where the federation comes in. The tech has a lot of room to grow, but you never have to move to join the “winning” group for a topic - you just have to sub

        Moving forward, there’s already talk about how/if you should reconcile overly similar groups across servers. It’s certainly possible, and discovery is definitely going to improve quickly - the only question is can Lemmy hold onto the new users long enough to get past the growing pains