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?

  • OtterEnglish
    21•8 months 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
      11•8 months 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
        6•8 months 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.