this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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I'm really enjoying lemmy. I think we've got some growing pains in UI/UX and we're missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn't going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?

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By not all ending up on the same server.

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

A small cloud server + a domain name costs less than a Netflix subscription. The developers have taken care to package lemmy in ways that are relatively straight forward to deploy, so a dedicated person with a small amount of experience can have an instance up and running in an evening. As long as a few percentage of users are willing to pay a netflix subscription to keep a server running, the financial burden would be spread.

[–] Stumblinbear@pawb.social 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they'll give up because the bigger instances are closed. Someone's gotta pay for it, and it's going to cost more than a Netflix subscription. Servers aren't cheap.

This also ignores that the system isn't horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

[–] Sal@mander.xyz 6 points 1 year ago (12 children)

I think this underestimates how users will naturally gravitate towards more centralized instances, or they’ll give up because the bigger instances are closed.

(This is purely my personal opinion, of course!) In the scenario in which a few large instances dominate, the idea of the fediverse failed. One may estimate the likelyhood of success or failure given how they expect humans to behave, but in the end experiment beats theory. I think that for the fediverse to work a significant cultural shift has to occur, but I don't think that it is an impossible shift. I would like the fediverse to succeed, and so I choose to take part in the experiment.

This also ignores that the system isn’t horizontally scalable at all, so scaling up gets even more expensive

Yes, that might cause some serious issues. The project is still in an early-development phase, and I don't understand the technical aspects well enough yet to be able to identify whether there is obviously a fundamentally invincible barrier when it comes to scalability. My optimistic hope is that the developers are able to optimize horizontal scalability fast enough to meet the demand for scale. If it turns out to be impossible to scale, then only rich enough parties would be able to have viable instances, and that could be a reason for failure.

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[–] tezoatlipoca@lemmy.ca 32 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As everyone else has already said that's a very good question, one that doesn't necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I'd point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn't unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we've had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster's expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like "federated" instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone's data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn't abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I'd guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren't people donating to open source projects... and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

[–] eekrano@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Do you happen to know what service that's with? Trying to see what resources that takes. ($25-$30 can mean very different specs depending on where it is hosted). Ty.

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[–] Bumble@fedia.io 29 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's certainly a challenge. I run three instances on the #fediverse. Two small ones and a larger one with 450 users. I have a donation page; initially people were enthusiastic and I covered costs. Now, I have regular monthly donators but not enough to cover costs so I am subsidising it. I took the decision when I launched that it could happen and it's my problem.

I think there will be many instances will fall away in the coming months due to costs. Especially if you are thousands of users and associated costs.

We need to come up with a new funding model, where people appreciate you get nothing for nothing. All the large corporates sell your data as advertising for revenue. The greater public do not appreciate they are selling their soul.

[–] eekrano@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Is there an approximate specs per number of users guide to size a lemmy instance?

[–] mer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'd love to get an approximate sense of how much these instances cost

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[–] rektifier@sh.itjust.works 22 points 1 year ago

I think the biggest cost will be image/video storage. The text takes very little space in today's standards. The good thing is that symmetric fibre internet connections are becoming more common so it may be possible for members of the instance to contribute unused disk space to help with its image/video storage. This plus limiting the image/video sizes (and maybe forbidding video uploads altogether) will allow the instances to scale with user count.

[–] Wander@yiffit.net 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That's why I'm running my own server. Mastodon is much bigger than Lemmy and it does fine with community run servers.

[–] jlh@lemmy.jlh.name 11 points 1 year ago

Yeah technical users and people who are friends with technical users can just use a micro instance.

[–] bitrate@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Yep, I'm using lemmy.world mostly as a trial period, but I plan on getting on my own instance to help reduce the load on the community any way I can. Will probably get a few friends on it as well.

[–] Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Don't forget to make a donation to your instance if you love it. For most of us it's a bit early but I give my 10 EUR per year to my Mastodon admin. Also, if you can choose instance ran by a non profit rather than a person as it ease the whole donation mechanism and give you the right to check where your membership due go.

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In all honesty, there are a ton of us tech enthusiasts who have no problem paying 10-20$ per month to run an instance out of our own pockets. We get the ability to subscribe to content we used to use Reddit for, and we can have a few folks hop on with us. Multiply that by a bunch, and add in community funded instances, and we'll be fine.

Gotta consider server costs were only a fraction of Reddit's costs. Salaries are quite pricey, and we have lots of folks volunteering time which will make it all work.

[–] manitcor@lemmy.intai.tech 15 points 1 year ago

this works on the same principals as fidonet, UseNet, email, etc. These protocols are more like fundamental services. The idea behind these was that instead of running a bunch if proprietary garbage you would run things that support A LOT of standard protocols. Why? Because NO ONE should be allowed to own our communications but ourselves.

The corps did not build these networks, we did. Software will improve over time, OSS shows the way.

[–] slashzero@hakbox.social 13 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

You bring up a very good point. Currently lemmy.ml has thousands of users. Lemmy.world has thousands of users. The hardware they have selected to run their instances is adequate for now, but, what is the plan for scaling out if the user base grows? Is there one? They have a donation page on each lemmy instance (click or tap the heart icon,) but that can’t be enough to pay for the cost of running something used by millions of people, even if only 100s of thousands are ever only online at any given time.

In terms of UI/UX, @dessalines@lemmy.ml has mentioned in a post they are currently working on major performance improvements and enhancements.

[–] PorkrollPosadist@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It is an old programming trope that premature optimization is a waste of time. As Lemmy scales, several bottlenecks will be hit. Some might be predictable, but many will only become evident after crossing a specific threshold. There are a lot of guides for scaling Mastodon servers after hitting certain bottlenecks, but this is all uncharted territory for Lemmy and we're going to find out the fun way.

[–] slashzero@hakbox.social 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Real devs do it in prod!

I’m seriously tempted to write some performance tests in jmeter, locust, or k6, and fire up some live traffic simulations / simulated load against my lemmy instance to see what happens. But at the same time that would feel too much like work and I don’t want to work over the weekend.

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[–] mjohanning@beehaw.org 13 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Ideally, I think no one instance should have a million users to begin with.

[–] maporita@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

User caps might be a good way to decentralize and ensure that we don't end up with just a few mega-instances. If there were a page showing available instances with percent of max users then people could use that when selecting.

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[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 year ago

I signed up for the lemmy.ml Patreon and am happy to support an open, federated site like this. I'd never pay for Reddit Gold, Twitter Blue, Discord Nitro, or any of those other nasty pay-to-win commericalized things but I'll pay to keep an open platform from implementing stupid "premium" bullshit.

[–] pre@fedia.io 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

@psylancer If you got 100 million users so that it's costing 400 million dollars a year, then ideally you need one million servers with 100 users on each. They need to all pass around a hat between their 100 users to raise the 50 dollars in server costs a month.

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[–] jon@lemmy.tf 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

The distributed nature of Lemmy should make things more manageable. Personally, I'm running an instance on a dedicated machine I already pay for, so it's not costing me anything unless storage skyrockets. Many other instance hosts are also hobbyists that don't mind covering the costs, and may take some form of donations locally on their sidebars.

There probably should be a built-in feature for instance admins to enable a local donation button to contribute to their costs, though. While Lemmy is fairly resource-efficient, larger instances are eventually going to require pretty beefy VMs to keep up with the traffic, image uploads, etc. I could see some instances randomly vanishing when their owners can't/don't keep up with their bills (which would force users over to other instances), but ideally if any instance owners can't afford to cover it, they hand control over to another community member to pick it up.

[–] moreeni@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago

In general, Fedi admins simply close registrations when they can't keep up with an influx of new users, and point people to other, smaller instances

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[–] Anissem@lemmy.ml 8 points 1 year ago

Donating $20 a month over here, hope it helps

[–] Korgen@kbin.korgen.xyz 7 points 1 year ago

Each instance funds itself. Some might try ads, but as of now, most are just funded by donations.

[–] jgrim@discuss.online 7 points 1 year ago

The cost will be spread out, and people can monetize how they see fit. I'm wondering if there will be additional benefits you can add to your instance for a charge that people might be willing to pay.

I'm considering offering an Element server and maybe email on mine with a shared username for each service. That's going to take time to setup, though.

We must prove that it's valued and let the monetization come later. I'm working on this in my spare time. Once I can grow, maybe I can put more effort into it. I think it'll be a lot of people like me for a while financing it out of pocket.

[–] minorsecond@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago

I just signed up for the Lemmy.ml patreon. I wish they had a $5 per month option, but I can just not skip ordering doordash one extra time and help pay for this instance. I use the hell out of it so it's the least I can do.

[–] dogmuffins@lemmy.perthchat.org 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.

Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.

It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.

That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.

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[–] actuallyacat@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Reddit has over 2,000 employees most of whom are doing bullshit nobody using the site actually needs or wants, it's possible to run a lot leaner than that. Like Reddit itself used to, before they started burning hundreds of millions trying to compete with every other social media site at once instead of being Reddit

[–] RickyRigatoni@lemmy.ml 11 points 1 year ago

bullshit nobody using the site actually needs or wants

Like being CEO.

[–] LadyAutumn@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit's whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They're not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn't even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn't scale linearly, there's only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn't possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn't make sense either.

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[–] pinwurm@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (7 children)

Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It's not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.

With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn't. Meaning there's fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn't succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.

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[–] zachary3752@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

Unlike Reddit there will be many lemmy servers that exist, and I assume most will be supported by donations. A lot of servers have an Open Collective or Patreon option if you want to support them.

[–] EdibleSource@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

I would like to join a cooperatively owned instance.

I have been tempted to join cosocial.ca, however I don't care for microblogging (Mastodon) as much as something forum-like such as a Lemmy instance.

[–] Rogueren@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I think Lemmy, like Mastodon, will crumble if people don't wrap their heads around federation. Mastodon stuggled because everyone just joined mastodon.social, not understanding that the server you join only affects your local timeline.

We need to teach people that you can join a small instance and still get 99% of the stuff you want from every other instance

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[–] pproe@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (6 children)

I know that it is not a popular topic in 2023 but a blockchain currency that allows users to 'award' posts/comments (similar to tipping in /r/dogecoin days) could provide instance owners with a source of income by taking a small portion of tips on their server.

Such a system would likely scale alongside user activity (read server load) and would encourage higher quality content. Would love to hear peoples thoughts on this.

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[–] torknorggren@sopuli.xyz 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] salarua@sopuli.xyz 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

not forbidden, just difficult to make work. you'd have to create a fork of Lemmy with support for ads, and you'd have to convince people to come to your instance when there are so many ad-free instances out there

[–] chaorace@lemmy.sdf.org 7 points 1 year ago

As we've already seen, there remains a pretty strong impulse for users to centralize on a single instance (as evidenced by lemmy.ml and mastodon.social). Ads can be wielded as a way to drive users to less burdened instances while also serving to help mitigate operating costs -- it's actually a rather elegant solution when you think about it from a problem-solving perspective rather than a profit-making one!

[–] mrmanager@lemmy.today 4 points 1 year ago

People who hate ads.

So good luck.

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