Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
They aren’t. Do they need to be, though? Maybe once the scale gets gargantuan, but even then - is it strictly necessary to be profitable? As long as donations cover costs, I assume most instance administrators want what the rest of us want - a good platform for discussion and content aggregation.
That’s a good point. If the organization that hosts the instance is non-profit, they merely need cover their costs.
I agree with this sentiment, there are a lot of admins who are very virtuous and and will pay money out of pocket and dedicate time to this cause which is appreciated. The big thing in the beginning is the actual time it takes to run an instance, when servers get big they are going to need employees, no one can be on call 24/7 for something that costs them money (with the exception of a child).
Once Lemmy has around a million active users funding the actual server costs will become a problem but I’m sure people will figure out how to make money off of it well before then, wether it be ads, data selling, alternative services, subscription models or something else.
Whats important right now is that as a community we do what we can to keep this place alive, and to help out the hard working admins.