Lemmy.ca runs on donations, It is ultimately up to the admins of each instance to decide how to monetize each instance.
Currently Lemmy.ca costs about 25$/mo to run. Although given all the growth that seems like it’s out of date. You can donate here or here. Tallying up both donations reported values (remember that the donation site probably takes a cut) the instance makes 150 a month from 30 users, so we are more than set for the next little while.
So, the thing about the federated system, is that the server loads are distributed among the different instances that are run by individuals. This way, no one instance gets too big to afford to sustain itself.
But yeah, basically donations are what any instance will likely be run off of. I’m sure there will be people trying to profit off of it somehow, by charging people for accounts, maybe, at some point. Or running ads, etc. But as it is right now, I believe the idea is to have this system be free and sustained through donations.
*edit: The best way to get an answer to a question is to confidently post an incorrect answer and let someone correct you. :)
It’s not quite that straightforward. There’s some non linear network effects – as more communities emerge, each instance is likely to be pulling content from more and more communities. Thus the storage costs along will baloon, and the instance to instance communication will baloon, but not necessarily scaling with user count. It’s not likely to be scalable in the long term, if my math is correct.
It’d be like each subreddit having to make a copy of the entire reddit database, over the network, to participate in reddit. Works on a small scale. Fails badly if the community is too large.
Add comment