Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
It takes money to run, but it doesn’t need money to “be”.
Imagine a group of people rent a building to hang out in; of you’re a regular you chip in some bucks. Lots of people, a few bucks each, roof over your head.
Get out of that “free” mindset. It was a trap all along. Some of us old pharts have known this, some of us (not me) have been coding stuff like Lemmy and other open software all along.
Right away i knew Lemmy.world was viable; I’m gladly paying 5 bucks/mo! No ads! No corporate extraction of personal data!
Hell, pay TWO bucks a month. Seriously wtf 2 bucks you could lose and not notice.
Yup. You can be profitable without expecting to get rich. The insane corporate expectations of “20% growth every year forever” directly leads to the enshitification of everything it touches, especially social media.
You can pay in Lemmy? New user here. It is confusing enough to understand the concept of federation.
I’m sure popular instances have setup Patreon accounts and the like for donations. Each instance is (essentially) being run by some person. It’s just someone who decided it was worthwhile to set it up. They probably started with a small server in the cloud. At the start, it might have been free. But as more people join/interact, it starts to cost money. So the owner of an instance probably looks to the community to keep it running.
It’s cheap to run, but it does still scale with the number of uses. So, it’s very fair to have a place to ask for donations to keep an instance running without burdening the person who ownsit.