Crazy-ish idea, but maybe Lemmy could make a feature where instances can have custom awards similar to Reddit gold and stuff, and users can buy them to both award posts they like and financially support the instance host
Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That’s 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it’s written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it’ll be even cheaper to host on donations.
You’d think so but mastodon world shared all of their financial information and their costs are entirely covered (plus some) by their Patreon. I do think if the fediverse became fully mainstream it’d be a different story though
One other thing I don’t see people pointing out is that Lemmy is basically a successor to classic web forums, so companies may run their own so they can have full control over the experience and moderation like for movies, series’s, or games, and in which case they would be more than happy to eat the cost of hosting. For example there could be a Lemmy.Disney.com instance to act as a Disney sanctioned discussion zone for their products where they could put tons of moderation rules in place.
As far as I understand it currently people host their own Lemmy instances just for the hell of it or out of the goodness of their heart
But the larger instances will end up costing more money and I’m doubtful that will be sustainable with no income
Crazy-ish idea, but maybe Lemmy could make a feature where instances can have custom awards similar to Reddit gold and stuff, and users can buy them to both award posts they like and financially support the instance host
Users actually run a lot of larger instances on the Fediverse off of donations! I run a larger Mastodon server and we get literally double our monthly costs in donations. For every month we stay open, that is two months longer we stay open. Absolutely wild. We have about 1.5k users, with about 20-30 of them donating maybe $5-10 monthly. That’s 2%-ish of the user base donating. Lemmy is LEAGUES easier to host given that it’s written in Rust and is incredibly resource efficient. So I can only imagine it’ll be even cheaper to host on donations.
You’d think so but mastodon world shared all of their financial information and their costs are entirely covered (plus some) by their Patreon. I do think if the fediverse became fully mainstream it’d be a different story though
One other thing I don’t see people pointing out is that Lemmy is basically a successor to classic web forums, so companies may run their own so they can have full control over the experience and moderation like for movies, series’s, or games, and in which case they would be more than happy to eat the cost of hosting. For example there could be a Lemmy.Disney.com instance to act as a Disney sanctioned discussion zone for their products where they could put tons of moderation rules in place.