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?
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.