I just discovered mander today and am super excited by it. At numerous points in my musings on lemmy communities, I have returned to the question of sustainability. This is what brought me to mander: the thought that an instance can shut down at any moment, so I sought to diversify. Now I am encouraging some of my favorite subreddits to migrate here, and I was confronted with the same question of sustainability. It was phrased a bit more bluntly: " who pays for it and for how long?"
When the means dry up, what happens? Is the server transferred to another “owner”?
Are the costs low enough that it can be supported by existing resources (assuming user donations and a generous “owner”)?
External funding: Wikipedia might be a good model to follow? Government funding? Surely some of us have written grants.
I really want to see something like this grow and prosper. However I also want to be sure it is worth the time for the contributors and that I have good answers to my favorite forums when presented with the above questions.
Onward!
As someone who has done both cloud VPS and local hosting, I agree that local hosting on your own hardware is much more fun. I was going to spin up my own instance of Lemmy but found this one instead!
Since there’s no way to load balance servers the best I can offer right now is an off-site backup location for the database if you were looking for redundancy. But happy to offer any help I can going forward.
If you ever decide to run your instance and you need any help let me know! There is also an active chat on Matrix.
Thank you for the offer! The current size is very manageable (~30 GB) and I have a redundant off-site copy and a few different options (like external SSDs and my office computer) available to increase the redundancy if needed, so I think that I have this issue covered without needing to bother other people with responsibilities!