I’m wondering how are all those different Lemmy instances financed? I know some rely on donations, but is that all and is that sustainable?

  • @[email protected]
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    5811 months ago

    My instance of ~300 users (and uh, far less active ones) is costing me $223/year

    I’ve had users donate about $25 so ~10% community funded and 90% admin funded.

    That’s fine by me at the current cost. Though if we somehow got a bunch of new users I’d have to cut off signups at some point unless more donations rolled in. I could probably handle a sizeable increase in users first though.

    • @[email protected]
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      2611 months ago

      Thank you for being transparent. This helps those of us who don’t know how to spool up our own instance figure out how much to donate. Much appreciated.

      • @[email protected]
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        1111 months ago

        $15/mo server rental, plus a few dollars to store backups on a separate service, object storage for media, email, and domain registration. Total $18.64

        I have a home server that could easily handle it, but I wouldn’t want to put something so public on it.

          • @[email protected]
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            111 months ago

            If you’ve already got the infrastructure in place for other projects, it can drop costs dramatically. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone there was already doing a lot of web hosting and just threw this in their stack. There are also a number of housing companies that will cut great deals for non profits if they’re at up right.