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.
Another important factor to note is it takes a fraction of hosting power to host lemmy vs something like reddit, because reddit does an insane amount of power hungry tracking in the background. Lemmy (and apps like jebora) don’t collect anything, so don’t need to constantly stream all that data to the main server instance
TIL that tracking takes a lot of power.
It doesn’t. Reddit’s backend is huge because it has a huge number of users all around the world, and they want it to be fast and reliable for everyone. Lemmy is tiny because it doesn’t handle many users and runs in a single instance in a single location. We’ve already seen load problems and instances go down due to updates and other availability issues.