I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
I suspect reddit’s reported uprofitablity isn’t due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
I read they have 2000 staff members, why so many? The moderation is done by volunteers, just seems excessive.
Engineers to develop chat and new ad features.
Sales & customer support (for advertisers, not users).
PR & media relations.
Executive junket planning & goat molestation.
… yeah, no idea.
Somehow not fixing the underscore bug that breaks most links to Wikipedia.
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We don’t even know for a fact if they are truly unprofitable or not, it’s not like anyone here has reviewed their books.
No, but it would be extra stupid for Spez to say that if it weren’t true because it could affect investments and draw legal action.
Honestly, who knows at this point? I’ve seen some horrible business/legal decisions happen over the last 5-10 years. Some people will practically set themselves on fire just for the chance to make higher profit. Hypothetically, this certainly wouldn’t be the first case of a sketchy business drawing bad legal attention to itself, not by a long shot. I have seen a lot of businesses shut because of this type of behaviour.
The other lies from Spez about the developers certainly don’t help his case, either. That’s another fantastic way for Reddit to open themselves up to potential legal issues.
Back in the day, Reddit used to show how much of their server costs were being covered by Reddit gold revenue alone. It was basically always enough to cover daily usage.
Their hosting costs also rose exponentially when they decided to host their own videos and pictures.
Which they could have locked behind Reddit Gold or some pay-tier. /shrug