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 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.