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?
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.