Hi there, fresh fledditor learning the ropes around here.
I have noticed there are a couple of communities that haven’t been created yet that I was a regular in on reddit. I’ve been thinking about starting new ones here, but don’t really understand who pays for the overhead if I create a new community.
Since this isn’t a centralized website like reddit, what infrastructure does a new community depend on and who pays for it?
Thanks yall.
you only need to maintain the community if you make one, similar to a moderator role in reddit (also called mods here though lol), there’s no cost there but you also don’t get paid, just like reddit mods. Only the server admins maintain the server, and if it gets bigger, all the costs are on the admins. That’s why they open donation channels, and you can support them through that.
note : server admins, each server has their own admins. For example, you’re on lemmy.ml, that one has their own admin, but I’m replying from lemmy.world (magic of the fediverse) which has different guy as admin. You can just support the server you’re in.
the downside is that if an admin (or several, maybe some servers are run by a group, I don’t know) can’t no longer support a server, any data including your account in that server is gone. Hopefully a ‘migration’ feature can be implemented in the future.
Thanks so much for the info!
Worries me a little bit on the scalability side of things, but honestly I kinda hope this place doesn’t get as big as reddit got. I enjoyed that place a lot more before it got huge. The content and conversations were just better all around.
Well that’s also where fediverse is a perk. There are, and likely will always be parallel channels on different instances. IE so while lemmy.ml may have the largest asklemmy, there probably will be smaller less active asklemmy’s on other instances.
Every Fediverse server is hosted by someone, somewhere. They can choose to handle the costs for that in any way that they wish. Some collect Patreon and paypal donations, some just eat it. Some probably plan on attempting to monetize eventually and have a roughly budgeted amount they are willing to lose first. Some will be funded and owned by Zuckerberg. Some will be run as nonprofits with a trust of some sort. Some will … etc etc. Everything under the sun basically. There is no “one way” things will work, due to the federated nature. Things will always work in many, many different ways.