This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    67
    ·
    1 year ago

    As some instances grow, server costs are becoming significant. Right now, servers are only funded through donations. Do you see the development of anything else to help fund server costs?

    • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      43
      ·
      1 year ago

      If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I’ll answer that in other comments).

      Of course we don’t plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.

      • HobbitFoot @thelemmy.club
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        19
        ·
        1 year ago

        I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.

        Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.

        I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.

        I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.

        • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          47
          ·
          1 year ago

          It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            48
            ·
            1 year ago

            Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven’t even come close reaching postgres’s actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.

        • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month

          If I really wanted to shoestring it, I could definitely get it lower. But I did want some headroom to grow, and to operate semi-professionally. With the recent upgrades we should be good for a while.

          (Also if anyone wants to jump to a small instance, thelemmy.club has some room :)

        • Dandroid@dandroid.app
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 year ago

          I run an instance on a spare computer that I had lying in my house. If I had to guess, I would say running my instance probably costs less than a dollar per month.

      • Roane@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Sorry for stupid questions and doubts 😭 but you said you don’t plan to add any plan, monetization or ads. SO never ever right? I’m willing to donate a hell lot to support the lemmy. So it’ll always remain like this innocent, inherently open source and always have the same “our”/ “people’s” internet, and never like a platform that is above us like it feels when using Twitter or reddit? (I said stupid question cus idk if having activitypub adopted and being decentralized makes lemmy and other platforms inherently “people’s” open-source and free internet?

        • Dessalines@lemmy.mlOPM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          We will never have ads or in-app monetization or crypto scams, no. We’ll always be 100% funded by donations and open source grants.