Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable?
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?
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If you want to see your instance survive, see what you instance admins have in mind regarding funding.
And donate. Depending on how many users there are, but 10 bucks a year per user would bring instances a long way.
That makes sense! But I’m also curious is this the only way of income without relying stupid ads, or can you think of other things?
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
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
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.
Thanks! I’m glad to hear that!
I mean.. you could try merch..? not much else