this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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It seems that for a large Lemmy instance to be sustainabile long term (especially at the level of traffic reddit sees) it requires ads and/or raising enough donations like Wikipedia (sh.itjust.works)
submitted 1 year ago by spiritedpause@sh.itjust.works to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml
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Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they're going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?

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[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Limit instances to 2000 users. Rely on donations. Once the software will be mature enough, we will know exactly how much it costs per users. Users can even pay for others (I wouldn't mind cover the costs for users I would know who could not afford it).

Ads require tracking to be valuable

[–] ShittyKopper@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

i'd say 6-7k users would be a better figure, but i do agree with your overall point. anything above 10-15k just hurts the health of the federation in the long term and ends up creating "untouchable" servers. even worse on lemmy where communities are also bound to instances.

though now that i'm thinking about it, a better metric would be active users rather than total users

[–] Blaze@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago

I just gave 2k because it seems that today it's the sweet spot in terms of resources consumption, and thus cost. Maybe that can evolve in the future?

But thanks federation, that should not affect the experience too much. You could even imagine large instances such as LW having LWprime, LWsecond, etc.