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?
Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
I don’t host any instances myself, but I have experience with web hosting in general. Yes, the hardware will need to scale vertically with more activity, but I don’t know what lemmy’s anticipated load thresholds are.
I would guess a decent i7 with an SSD and 16GB+ RAM would handle lemmy quite comfortably for a good while. So the expense isn’t entirely trivial, but it’s nothing compared to a centralized service with hundreds of millions of regular users.
HW gets cheaper. And prolly in big group will be some ppl who can donate. And we are going to experience burst of bots. One way how to fight them is pay little for posting. Or maybe we shutdown internet BCS of CO2. Everyone need to decide if they wanna pay with money or data, there is no free lunch.
Shut down the internet because of co2?!
While both HW and power gets cheaper (in the grand scheme of things), the consumption of natural resources does not. Data centers that run everything you do online consume a lot of power. That does not mean you need to stay offline or else the planet dies, but IMO, everyone should keep it in mind.