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Wikipedia is the 7th most visited website in the world, more popular than Amazon, TikTok, even PornHub. It's not funded by advertisers or other bullshit - rather through reader donations.
With that said, Wikipedia is still centralized content whereas Lemmy isn't. Meaning there's fewer expenses and pressure on any one instance or server to succeed. And if one instance or server doesn't succeed, your access to the Federation is far from over.
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
It doesn't have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.
I really don't care how to decorate my account as long as I can keep using the same service that I would want to use on a regular basis .... I'd pay for the server and I really don't care what they give me because the fact that they exist and continue to exist is more than enough repayment for me
What happens to your account on a federated server if that one fails though?
As someone who burned reddit accts regularly this doesn't really concern me. But if it really worries you couldn't you set up your own private instance with you as the sole user? Nothing is more reliable than yourself. Even corporations with millions of dollars can close up shop at a moments notice.
There already is a question similar to this. You can find lots of ideas there :)
You can always have paid-access Lemmy servers
I suspect reddit's reported uprofitablity isn't due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
sell checkmarks like Tumbler.
for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.
The thing is, Lemmy is decentralized. You don't need to have an account on an instance (server) to use that instance's "subreddits" (communities) - instances communicate their activity to each other automatically, so any instance will do (provided the instances haven't banned each other). It's just like email.
So it's pretty simple to just stop accepting sign-ups once an instance starts to become impractically large. Anyone can start an instance for just the cost of a domain ($10ish/year, or free if it's a subdomain of an existing website) and a server (that random computer you already have lying around will do just fine, for free). And a small instance can do fine on just donations and the good will of the operator.
Apropos of nothing, where are you finding domains for $10/year?
Check tld-list.com for price comparisons of different domain providers.
It's literally all donated
I bought a server for about 100 a year... With my whopping 2 users... It's overkill... So... My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno
48 for one user, I'm just barely more efficient. Unless you are talking $ and not โฌ, then you win ;)
Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.
There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.___
Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
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.
Everyone? At once and next week? It would just die.
Kbin.social had a nice post (check their meta community for it; it's technically a different software, but still), how the instance went from costing $2-3 a month to 1000. And that's a tiny fraction of reddit.
Development needs to advance just to better handle current user counts, there's a lot of things that simply never were an issue when only a few hundred users were active.
The way it will work, is probably donations, maybe some very few paid instances.