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this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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I'm running a barebones server for myself and a few communities (not many subs yet) which will run for less than a Starbucks coffee a month... (Assuming I don't need more storage space... Lemmy seems pretty light. The main servers are gonna carry the load unfortunately... Beehaw.org had a transparency post about financials as of about a week ago they said something that their instance was costing like 50-75ish a month of I recall.
Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
- a competition between the various instances, on which collects the most donations
- not shift the page content when displaying the donation banner!
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
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By not asking the same question every single day.
It's literally all donated
donations to my favorite instances, like wikipedia i hope :)
I bought a server for about 100 a year... With my whopping 2 users... It's overkill... So... My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno
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As paradoxical as it is, I think that these open source non-profit projects are a lot more efficient than profit-driven, debt-fueled corporations.
First of all, the main contributors to a FOSS project do it for passion and do not take a salary.
Secondly, they don't have the infinite growth mindset that pushes enterpreneurs to to spend as much as possible for maximum growth, all financed by a growing amount of investors (and debt, which costs interest fees).
If a FOSS project reaches maximum capacity, they will close subscriptions, they will throttle traffic, i.e. they will slow down growth, but they will not go into debt. Slowing down growth is something that a for-profit company would never do (at least until the interest rates were low and the investors were plenty, today idk). Eventually someone else in the community will decide to do a generous donation or open their own instance.
I suspect reddit's reported uprofitablity isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
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I think the idea is that many people can run lemmy servers so the load is split between everyone hosting them.
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You can always have paid-access Lemmy servers