I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?

  • Blaze
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    38
    ·
    1 year ago

    If you want to see your instance survive, see what you instance admins have in mind regarding funding.

    And donate. Depending on how many users there are, but 10 bucks a year per user would bring instances a long way.

    • Portbane@lemmy.zipOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      ·
      1 year ago

      That makes sense! But I’m also curious is this the only way of income without relying stupid ads, or can you think of other things?

      • Otter@lemmy.ca
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        21
        ·
        1 year ago

        Donations or grants would probably be best. I’m sure there are community grants available for doing public good.

        I’ve also seen some open source things sell merch, where you buy a hat or something with a particular logo. It’s still donating with extra steps, but it’s a little different

        Our instance admin broke it down recently, and it’s actually not too expensive to run. Without wasting money on engagement, growth, data collection, marketing, etc, it’s not actually that expensive to run social media platforms I guess

        • ShunkW@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          11
          ·
          1 year ago

          Until you get into image/video/file hosting, it’s very cheap. So long as people are ok with off-site storage usage, then it shouldn’t cost much at all.

          Merch is a pretty big risk, or at least was when I was doing it for bands. I know there are solutions for on demand creation now that might be more feasible

          • bdonvr@thelemmy.club
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            6
            ·
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            Honestly the images aren’t TOO bad, or not as bad as you’d think. I have 160GB right now and pay less than $2/mo for it.

            Of course with more active users that’ll scale quickly at which point I’d probably tighten up on the upload limits.

            I’m also using Cloudflare R2, I could move to something like Backblaze (which I already use for backups) and could possibly lower that.

      • Blaze
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 year ago

        Good for them! Other instances might need it, so it depends