If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
Think the bigger instances hosts will need ads if there’s a large enough audience but that’s OK to an extent when you weigh it up against a free API
As long as it breakeven on costs, doesnt need to make profits
There are Mastodon instances with hundreds of thousands of active users, and none of them are ad supported. Donations generally are capable of paying the operating expenses, as long as the staff is halfway decent at creating a space that people appreciate.
I’m happy to donate and will do, just like buying an app really if once per year.
But are users going to donate to both the instance(s) they’re using, and the Lemmy devs?
Will a regular ordinary non-technical user even know to do this?
Or would it be the responsibility of the instance admins to forward part of their donations to the Lemmy project?
Also, ads would only be useful when hitting the actual instance site in a browser, many (or most) users will use some sort of app I imagine.