My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year

I've had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.

That's fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I'd have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.

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.

Well, Mastodon has been around since 2016 IIRC which is nearly 8 years and it's still growing and expanding. There's no reason to suppose Lemmy will be any different.

A large part of the issue of sustainability is intent. Meta, Twitter, Microsoft, Google etc are profit driven. By that standard, no fediverse software is sustainable because for-profits only care about continual growth leading to continual profit.

Lemmy is open source. No one who develops it or hosts an instance really cares about it being financially profitable so there's not that motivation. The motivation is more akin to doing something positive for people and at the same time, indulge in a hobby/interest they have. If the people who benefit from it (you and me, the users) recognise that benefit I would hope they donate to its development and the instance they're on. This in turn enables the users who can't afford to donate to still be able to participate in a system where profit is not King.

So sustainability in the fediverse really means 'can I afford to keep doing something I enjoy doing?' As long as they can, it's sustainable.

Here's what interests me: obviously on a single instance you need to scale the infrastructure as more users join. But how much do you need to scale to account for the usage of federated instances?

I ask that because the answer in this thread is broadly "it's sustainable because each instance is low cost, and you can always add more instances" but that doesn't work if, after the number of instances grows 100x, all existing instances face an increase in costs even if they didn't gain many more users, because they're receiving more messages from federated instances, and need to download and store stuff from those other instances for their local users.

I think it's more sustainable then Facebook ,Twitter and others. Why? Because it's federated! if one instance goes bankrupt or shuts down for whatever reason it doesn't close down the entire program. If anything, at worst a portion of Lemy communities would get erased from history. Lemmy in reality is really just an interface, with a bunch of different instances combined to provide the content. The cost is actually cheaper then other social platforms from the last 10 years+ like Facebook because in a way the cost for the "service" is divided by all the different instances hosted by volunteers,

I hope this makes sense, if any questions do ask.

I run lemmy.mindoki.com on a pc I built from spare parts (40€ dell plus for fun I got a hexa core for 50-ish and swapped out the celeron gold), only new "expensive" thing is the mechanical hard drive I guess but it's really not needed. I had it laying around and there were already an SSD. I also had the website so no hidden cost there either.

So it heats up my bedroom (but not enough, so the electricity cost is nil ATM).

I don't really have users though 😅

I don't see why not - there are loads of other sites, let's say DDL (roms etc) and various self-hosted blogs that chug along for years at the expense to the owner.

With Lemmy, the main concern would be growing storage, but that's mostly solved by using something like B2 or Wasabi to store images, instead of the local server. B2 also recently changed their plans to make it free to download to a certain extent (prior to this, you had to pay for downloads) which makes this route even more viable.

I'm aware of lemmyworld and dbzer0 being very public about their donations, and lemmyml has been run by the devs years before we migrated. Lemmee's admin is extremely active in the fediverse so that's likely to stay too. We've only migrated from reddit in the past few months, so i'd say a lot of lessons have been learned in that time, as well as the viability/sustainability of running reasonably big instances.

A fair few have folded in that time too, some just disappearing out of the blue (vlemmy, lemmyuk, lemmyfilm) and others not able to manage the moderation as well as abusive users. I don't think any have folded from it being too expensive to run - but I could of course be wrong there.

Personally, my blog site costs about $200/yr to run out of pocket, and is quite manageable at around $16/mo - comparable to a multiple-screen HD netflix subscription maybe. For a moderately used lemmy instance maybe you'd be paying $600/yr - about $50/mo which is still reasonably manageable. If just two users donated $50, your out-of-pocket costs drop to around $40. If all your users donated $2, assuming 100 users, your out of pocket drops to around $34.

The last time I checked, the largest instance Lemmyworld costs over $1k/mo to run (this also includes sister site mastodonworld, which is on separate infra but managed by the same core admin team IIRC). As of today there is a 4 month donation buffer, but looking at the graph on OpenCollective at least it looks like the admin team may need to cover a few hundred $ out of pocket if the buffer runs out, as monthly recurring donations is lower than the infra expenses. There are occasionally some very generous donors so I think it's financially sustainable for the time being.

Overall I don't think there's anything to be worried about, this is the fediverse so you're free to have an identity on any instance and still interact with the various communities. It's not like Digg or Myspace where "when it's gone, it's gone".

Depending on how larger instances go about monetizing, at a smaller scale donations can work. But once you hit a certain threshold costs for things like storage and staff go up a ton and pure donations will stop being enough.

Not at any scale.

Besides funding you already have enough infighting, power mods, and admins shaping content according to political belief.

So tell years fun now everyone is going to defed against most instances and it'll be even more of a pain in the ass to see content and it's going to continue to get reposted across the instances you do interact with.

So like, lemmy will be here but it's going to end up more like a traditional forum than interconnected communities.