If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

  • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do

    also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao

  • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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    1 year ago

    Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.

    Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.

    • Avian_Carrier@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Please make mod tools a top priority. It’s absolutely asinine that I need to have someone comment in a community to add them as a mod.

    • communick@communick.news
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      1 year ago

      28k€/month is not enough revenue to keep all the people who are working on Mastodon. Donations can only work if we assume that there will always be a constant flux of people willing to work for free, dealing with all the unpleasant things that most FOSS developers rather not do.

      • nutomic@lemmy.mlM
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        1 year ago

        I don’t know how many people work on Mastodon, but it should be enough money for around seven full time workers. Thats more than enough.

        • Viktorian@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          Even if you spend all of that on salaries and everybody earns the same, 4k€/month for a software dev job for example seems low in central Europe. That’s not even 50k a year. Some companies offer between 60 and 80k for entry level positions. You need closer to twice that much to be remotely sustainable with 7.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            I got paid much more in the private sector, and all my labor was entirely pointless, and contributed absolutely nothing to the betterment of society.

            I realized I’d much rather be doing important work, regardless of how much less the pay was. I read a book, called “the magic of thinking big”, and one of its points was to ask the question: “What are the biggest problems in the world today? And what are you doing to solve them?”

            We have one life to live, and my communist politics demand that I spend my most valuable resource, my labor time, on things that can result in the greatest benefit to humanity.

        • communick@communick.news
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          1 year ago

          The moment you factor in the costs of employment benefits (to cover their vacation time, sick days off, fund their retirement, health insurance…) and taxes, the 4k€/ brutto quickly becomes 2k€ net.

          I just hope you understand you won’t be the one determining what is “more than enough” - the market is, and the market is paying a lot more than 25k€/year for any decent Javascript/Rust developer. If you have people that live in areas with low cost of living and are okay with being severely underpaid for some higher purpose, then maybe you can pull it off. But it’s going to be basically impossible to find good people willing to stay for the long run with that attitude.

          • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            We wouldn’t be working on lemmy if our goal was to be rich. We just want enough to survive and pay rent, so we can make this project better.

            Once we do get to the point of us two devs being fully-funded by recurring donations on our liberapay, opencollective, patreon, etc (we’re not even close yet), then we’ll add more devs to our little worker co-op, and scale up as necessary.

  • Dessalines@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @[email protected] and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

    If you’d like to help us out, here’s our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

    Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I’m sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we’re working on something worthwhile.

    • ToastyWaffle@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I posted about one tap collapse/expand on comment threads about a week ago for jerboa. Latest update has it. Love the speed of development from you guys, keep it up!

    • Venus@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Liberapay is much preferred

      Maybe you should make that more obvious on the page somehow? Like make Liberapay a bigger button that’s separate from the rest, or just outright say in the text that it’s preferred? Because as someone with no preference between them and considering supporting, I probably would have gone with Patreon out of inertia/recognition.