Is Lemmy as a platform sustainable? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 year ago by Portbane@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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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[-] Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de 37 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] Portbane@lemmy.zip 12 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] otter@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 year 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 points 1 year 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 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year 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.

[-] Portbane@lemmy.zip 6 points 1 year ago

Thanks! I’m glad to hear that!

[-] rob299@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

I mean.. you could try merch..? not much else

this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2023

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