Others have answered the crux of your questions, which is that it's basically donations... either from the admins by providing free access to their server, or by the community through Patreon or whatever.
But to put into context how much money we're talking about...
A server to host 1k active users and 5k-10k registered users, you're talking about a 4cpu-8cpu box costing less than $20/mo. Plenty of nerds with decent jobs in wealthy countries are willing to write that off as a donation. This covers 99% of the <1k Lemmy servers in the world.
The 10 biggest Lemmy servers still only have hosting costs of $50-$300/mo. That's not nothing, but there are probably 10 wealthy nerds in the world willing to write that much off each month. And those costs can be offset through community donations. These servers support 10k-40k registered users, it doesn't take a ton of donations to cover that modest expense serving that many people.
Now, if you count admin/mod time and expertise, of course... those costs would be huge. But those people either volunteer or get a bit of money from non-profits. But the hardware costs are modest.
Do note, HOW they are hosting, pays into this a lot.
I have a server I host things on here locally-
256G of ram, 32 cores/64 threads. 130T of storage. Nvidia Tesla GPUs. Coral TPUs. Lots of NVMe too.
It costs 20-30$ of energy, along with internet use-costs.
Hosting, something of that scale in the cloud, would be outrageously expensive. However, here in my local home-datacenter, with redundant power, internet, and everything, its honestly not that bad.
And- I assure you, there is redundancy. My lemmy had basically no downtime AFTER getting hit by a tornado, and power to the city being out for most of the week.- > lemmyonline.com/post/3751
It's not the rules on those servers, but the rules on the server you belong to, i.e lemmy.world. Looking at their main site, their rule 3 is as follows:
Wow. Honestly this makes me seriously contemplate my move to Lemmy. I thought lemmy.world was at least a free speech endorsing server. So now we have the two biggest Lemmy instances out there that are clearly against free speech. Lemmy.ml is moderated by pro CCP mods that remove anything anti-china, and lemmy.world can't even tolerate a sub about conspiracy theories (which we should all know have a tendency of coming true the past few years) and is therefore already starting with stifling free speech.
Yeah, go start your own instance... Not everyone wants to run their own instance just to be able to browse communities on other instances that your current instance doesn't agree with.
Yeah... This is really putting a sour taste in my mouth about Lemmy already.
The “start your own instance” is twofold. You can indeed move away if you don’t like the rules one instance imposes. But at the same time, being an admin, you get the freedom not to associate with stuff you find problematic. You can’t expect an instance owner to pay for server space to host others’ whims.
From a more personal point of view, I’m really happy that I don’t have to engage with QAnon BS while browsing. It works well for the users too.
You do realize that conspiracy is far more than qanon stuff, right? It was an interesting sub to read from time to time on Reddit.
And yeah, I get "just run your own instance", but not everyone wants to deal with their own instance just to be able to freely browse communities without random censorship. I was hoping Lemmy wouldn't be that way. Don't know what it is about some people being so unable to tolerate opposing views from their own...
haha, that sounds awesome! I recently set up an Echo for my aunt, her first Alexa device. I told her she could ask it to play music. I expected her to ask for Andrea Bocelli or something, but she asked for Abba and then the Beegees. I've never heard her listen to disco in all my life, and then she started dancing. So of course I'm not gonna leave her hanging; I got up and boogied down with her.
That's the problem: it does not make money.
The fediverse mean that the different instances can federate, but every instance after all still has its server and its expenses just like every web service since... always. Forums, chats, socials...
So far donations or pro bono from whoever is managing an instance, but unluckily this is not sustainable if user number skyrocket.
A way would be to somehow make everything p2p but I don't even know if it's possible for what is needed.
Servers are expensive, either someone pays, or the instance closes.
As of now very few people are on the fediverse, so it's cheap.
But if we expect hundreds of millions of people to use it... expenses will skyrocket.
True, but the amount of instances will probably scale too. You can have premium instances that cost a monthly fee, ones that solicit donations, maybe ones that run ads. But you'll also always have the passion project instances being ran for a specific community out of the kindness of someone's heart.
It doesn't make money. It's funded either by donations, or out of the pockets of the instance owner(s). It doesn't mean that in the future, an instance owner wouldn't just decide to start serving ads, I don't think theres anything stopping them from doing that other than the threat of being defederated by other instances.
The world's most popular fanfiction website, Archive of Our Own, runs entirely on donations so it's certainly possible to run a website with a big userbase on donations only, although the website in question does not host images or videos so the situation is of course a bit different. But a dedicated userbase can actually make a donation run website possible.
I don't plan on going back to Reddit in a major way. After giving Reddit up, I find myself thinking over my experience on that site for the last few years. Engaging commentary was harder and harder to find, particularly in any sub of sufficient size, and I spent a lot of my scrolling through Reddit angry. Leaving Reddit has been a wake up call for me. It's a rat race on Reddit, and I don't need that in my life anymore.
I am so angry. I am so sick and tired of just stating my experiences as a woman and having people who are not women straight up tell me that I'm wrong. About my own life experiences. It's fucking exhausting to be surrounded on all sides by bad faith actors, knowing full well that you won't get through to them, and feeling defeated, like the world is going backwards and you can feel your rights being torn away from you bit by bit, trying desperately to stand up for yourself and having any words you say fall on deaf ears. I'm so sick of not being listened to. I'm so sick of not being believed. I am so fucking sick of not being respected. I just want to be treated like a human and not be criticised for literally just fucking existing.
I’m not a woman, but I am a minority living in a racist part of the USA, and I kinda know what you’re talking about. It’s really hard. I sometimes feel crazy because people don’t believe me.
I constantly have to play this game of, “are they being rude, do they not like me, or are they being racist?” I feel gaslighted all the time. I feel lesser and it’s tiring having to be who I am. Even people who think they are being kind are assholes. Telling me that I’m “not like the others” is such an insult to my people. “The others” are my friends and family. They are not “others” they are people to me.
I am sorry you are going through this. Your voice matters and is valid
Edit: Sorry for attaching my venting to yours. Pretty selfish of me now looking back
Oh gosh I cant even imagine dealing with all the racist little micro aggressions you have to deal with every day. Also don't feel bad for venting, you were just trying to relate, and I'm autistic so I relate in a very similar way. I feel for you too and I'm glad someone understands. ❤
I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I hate dealing with people enough as a man. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to deal with all the bullshit you are stuck with, having your opinions and experiences dismissed, etc. I hope things improve for you (and all women), but it looks like it’ll get worse before it (hopefully) gets better.
I really appreciate your comment more than you know. Just having a guy read what I wrote there and not only recognize it, but believe it and validate it means so, so much.
I'm lucky in that I have some close male friends probably a lot like you who are willing to listen and are actively improving themselves and I am so very thankful for that.
Media hosting is the biggest expense, and there are services that make that significantly cheaper through sharing and deduplication.
A major instance can probably get by on a few hundred dollars a month. If it has, say, 100k active users, and 1% of them donate $5 a month, then not only is there enough to cover infrastructure expenses, but they can also put some aside in a rainy day fund, use it to expand hosting to other platforms (lemmy.world is made possible, at least initially, by donations to mastodon.world), or even pay instance-level mods.
Mstdn.social, a very busy Mastodon site, has 200k users and runs on a 32 core VPS with 128GB of RAM. Comparable unmanaged VPS packages go for around $300/month. After that, it's all media storage.
Worst, up until the current fiasco, was having told a very deeply personal and unique story, but being torn to shreds because I wrote it pretty. That meant it had to be fake.
It taught me the lesson to never waste effort on reddit.
But the best was kinda the flip side of it. Similar thing, talking about death and dying, which was a large part of professional life, and despite writing it pretty, it resonated with people and I got some really nice conversations commiserating about the way that can change you.
I am already running a server for media streaming, nextcloud and minecraft. For sure i have room to add a small lemmy instance soon, not everything needs to make money or even be electricity even. But for larger instances though they must be gething some donations.
Everything needs to generate some sort of value - I imagine a lemmy instance would generate value for you in the form of learning, or maybe the sense of accomplishment from maintaining a community. That differs from how centralised social media generates value in the form of data or money which is usually at odds with the userbase.
It’s non profit by default, the very thing that social media needs.
People who run Lemmy servers do it at their own cost. That’s not to say they can’t run ads or choose other ways to become profitable. The big difference between a lemmy instance and something like Reddit is that anyone can start a new instance if the current one goes to shit. If the admins do something the users REALLY don’t like, they can migrate to another instance way more easily than switching platforms.
Reddit is counting on the effort of switching platforms being too high for lemmy to gain traction. They are wrong.
The developers do it for free, which is common in the open source community. There will always be volunteers to build the software and donors to support them.
I have wondered how migrating instances would work. Would anything come with me to a new account on a new instance or is it still similar to moving from Reddit where I'm starting over?
Tl;Dr: Banned from Ask a Trump Supporter for apologizing.
Once, I was young and care free - an Innocent. I thought: If only they could see the data they would believe! And, I was uniquely prepared to help them see and understand (I was working on Data viz at the time). And so I started posting in Ask a Trump Supporter. And we got into it. And, well, the dude had a point.
When you're wrong your wrong, so I apologized. And, I included a question mark in the apology.
Bam banned just like that for violating rule xyz about asking questions in the comments.
Never been so happy to be banned. Probably saved my marriage.
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