Curious how lemmy servers are paid for. Is it donation?
As others have already said … donations.
Something to keep in mind though is how cheap per user this whole thing can be.
Here’s the admin of mastodon.world and lemmy.world outlining their financials: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
They’re actually making money off of donations.
And if you look at the monthly costs (~500 Euro / month) and their Monthly Active Users (~35k), that turns out to be ~0.2 Euro per year. Without a need for profits, marketing, bloated features etc, the actual cost of social media per user per year is something we’d all be willing to pay (IMO).
Now obviously there aren’t salaries in that calculation. Moderation, admin-ing etc are all done voluntarily AFAIK, just like sub-reddit mods were on Reddit. Though, again, if someone wants moderating/admin-ing to be a side hustle of some sort, we all don’t need to donate much for there to be actual livable salaries (or supplementary salaries) in this kind of work. In fact, I think it’d be cool if social media went in that direction where organising popular and nice community spaces was just a thing you could do for a living with the skill and talent it requires being of recognised value.
Lemmy.world, as an instance, has 7 admins and 25k Monthly Active Users. If each donated $5 per year, that’s ~17k per year for each admin. Not a full salary, but maybe not bad for a part-time side hustle!
Reading this kind of made me see the way that Lemmy gets bigger and better than Reddit. If there’s money to be made here, even a small amount, people will migrate over.
Just throw $2 a month toward Lemmy on Patreon! Well worth it.
What are tanks tankies? What’s another alternative to Reddit?
It’s described in the link, “red fascists”, they support “”“communist”“” authoritarian regimes like the CCP and Russia.
Kbin is a good alternative which shares content with Lemmy.
I’m definitely not disagreeing with you, but Lemmy has grown so large since the original “tankies” started Lemmy.ml that I don’t think it is really an issue for the larger community. I’ve only been here for a month or so but I have not seen many (if any) communistic related posts on the feeds, and if they are trying to spread their leftist messages they are not doing a very good job of it.
I have found Lemmy.world to be the most active platform, so I wanted to help out with server costs, thus the $2 per month. I have also donated to Ernest at Kbin and the Beehaw folks as well. I’m not going back to Reddit, so I want these communities to thrive and feel I need to pitch in the cost of a Latte every month to help out. Having said that, if I ever get the feeling that I am donating to some authoritarian cause I will stop donating immediately.
I just wanted to make sure people knew that their money could go to tankies.
You said you were giving to “Lemmy” on patreon, not Lemmy.world so I assumed it was the devs.
Thanks. Do you have their Opencollective link?
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.
Makes you wonder about reddit api pricing…
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.
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.
I have an onlyfans for my feet pics that finances all of it
