How are lemmy and other fediverse platforms profitable?
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.
The funny thing is that not all human endeavours actually need to be profitable for them to exist. It's perfectly fine and normal for people to be generous and provide services for the community for nothing in return and for some of those in the community to help out too.
I'm going to split a hair here: any endeavour needs to be financially sustainable for it to continue existing. So yes, in terms of future growth of federated platforms, i am mildly concenrned that there may not be enough people willing to put in the work and expense of maintaining an instance just so free. If you imagine a future where the fediverse has Twitter or Instagram levels of users, it's pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?
it’s pretty likely that instance owners will want to monetize as much as possible, and then what happens?
why is that "pretty likely"?
People have been running services 24/7 for years, sometimes out of pocket, sometimes with basic community support. It does not have to be profitable, as you said, it has to be sustainable, which is vastly different.
Running any decently sized instance quickly turns from a hobby to at least a part-time job. A thing that you can't just quit whenever is not a hobby and we should be mindful of that.