It feels like more Lemmy apps are going to make their way on to the app stores. With more apps, comes more people. More people, more API calls. How do we scale this server and hopefully all of the others to come, financially?
There are some REALLY interesting Podcast 2.0 features in the works. Especially using “value4value” and “boosting” as a way for listeners to tip their favorite podcasts and fund them directly. I wonder if somehow we can learn from it?
For those who do not know, hopefully these Podcasting 2.0 features will help podcasters continue to thrive in world where companies like Spotify and Amazon have decided to destroy our incredible open and free podcast networks by making “exclusives” and putting them behind paywalls that don’t follow the open standards.
I’d really love to integrate Podcasting 2.0 RSS and the fediverse. How cool would it be if every podcast episode just had its own place in the fediverse with a place to chat and it all worked together somehow automatically.
I dunno. Just a thought.
Here’s some info:
I think donations are sufficient.
Lemmy doesn’t seem to be too hard to run. Current popular instances run on HW that costs well under 100EUR monthly which well within reason for crowd-funding.
I see you’re getting downvoted, and I do have to agree that it’s a pretty optimistic take. With traffic even a tenth what reddit gets, the costs would be significant.
Now it’s true that eg. Wikipedia can handle massive server load on a donation model, but I think the utility from Wikipedia is more obvious and more amenable to attracting donations. I think it’s a good idea to think about palatable monetization options early on, so we can avoid ending up in a situation where the experience has to suddenly get degraded by intrusive ads or whatever.
If costs sky up for an instance, they can shut off user inscriptions and users will be forced to join another instance, like lemmy.ml did soon after the reddit exode (even though it was server limitation rather than pure costs, but the same logic applies).
So sure, some instance will grow bigger than others, but an instance should never reach a point of non affordable costs. Users will have to accept that some X funding is required to make the user base growth possible.
And for server shrinking to be possible, Lemmy must allow some sort of account migration. If for any reason half the funding of a server goes away, the admin must be able to rate limit their server until some users migrate away (any sort of rate limitation will be enough for some people to look elsewhere). But if migration is not possible then a server might get locked in a state of heavy costs and nobody being able to leave without creating a new account.