I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.
Why? A single Linux server has been able to support tens of thousands of simultaneous clients for many years now.
Bandwidth is not free.
Text is small.
Are you talking about a specific server or just Linux servers in general?
I’m referring to the old “c10k problem”.
As opposed to a corperate social media site, Lemmy has waaaay lower operating costs (not servers). It’s open source so dev work is volunteer, and there isn’t a bunch of resources dedicated to squeezing users for every penny or appeasing advertisers.
Servers can get pricey for sure, but not having all of that other overhead goes a ways to making it more sustainable.
Worse come to worse I’m here for a good time not a long time.
Like if an instance like lemmy.world gets too big and fails I’ll probably head to another instance like kbin.social. If it starts a failure cascade people will leave for traditional social media or just leave social media entirely until federation can support it.
Maybe I end up leaving for another social media site, or I just watch youtube and no real social media or something. Whatever happens I’m here while I’m here.
I mean, define “too big”.
Lemmy.world and mastodon.world are funded from mastodon.world’s OpenCollective account: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
They seem to be doing alright atm, though who knows how much of that is a byproduct of recent immigration.
So I was wondering is it helpfull if i run my own instance than for me and my roommates ? Or ?
I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.
Is that really so though? Assuming some small percentage of the user base chooses to donate, would that not scale as the instance gets larger, as long as the percentage stays about the same?
I decided to toss something like a buck a month at my instance as I came with the reddit migration and didn’t want to be a part of the problem. I also appreciate the ad-free space we have here on lemmy.
And it’s not like running a PBS station or something in terms of costs. I’m actually pretty optimistic about the donation model, though maybe you’re right? Maybe the optimism is misplaced?
having a job on the side will help instance owners a lot
A large instance only needs a fraction of users to donate to be viable mastodon.social has like 100k users and they run on donations
Wikipedia has been running on donations for so many years. So I don’t think we are close to reaching that limit in any way
Wikipedia get donation from rich people and big corporations. I don’t think the fediverse that level of donation
