As more and more people migrate to lemmy from reddit (just like i did), how will lemmy adapt to the people coming in and the cost incurred for hosting it. I imagine as more people start posting stuff just like they do on reddit, the cost on the server will increase. And as lemmy doesnt have any ads or tracking or anything of that sort, how will it cope up with this?
I think donations can be sustainable considering wikipedia has done it for over a decade. People genuinely care about this fediverse project and donating a few dollars a month will probably keep this place growing and healthy. I also think we are too quick to predict the end of reddit. Millions will still use it while this place will remain almost unheard of to the average person for at least the next few years.
I mean the more people that join, the more people that donate. Reddit never got a cent from me directly, but I donated to beehaw when I made my account, and I plan to do it again, as this is just a small (but getting bigger) community, not a company trying to make a profit. They definitely won't be rolling in money but I think they'll be able to make it(and I certainly hope so)
What do you mean by retention? It has soft-deletion so data exists but is hidden; and due to the nature of federation, the deletion event can't be guaranteed to reach and be respected by every server that was originally sent the data.