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?
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?
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Are there any good and well known examples of this at a large scale, beyond Wikipedia and it’s projects?
Not that Wikipedia is not evidence in it’s own right that it could work, I’m just curious.
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That’s a great example. Expensive to operate, entirely non-profit, and been around since forever.
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Sorry that I don’t have an answer to your direct question, but
It doesn’t necessarily need to be at a large scale, because of federation. The technical knowledge needed to admin an instance is a barrier to entry now, but probably can be improved. We could eventually see an ecosystem where your WoW guild (or your college buds, or your found family, or your fantasy football league, or equivalent smaller community) hosts an instance for its members. You can still participate in federated discussions, and the subscriptions of the instance could stay comparatively filtered to what’s most important to the users of the instance.
You’ll always have bigger generalist instances, but the flexibility you can have with really small and topical ones shouldn’t be forgotten about imo, especially as the platforms/technologies mature.
plus it’s federated, not just a single site. The cost for hosting services are divided by instance so say one instance goes down, that doesn’t kill the entire program, although it would erase a portion of communities from Lemmy history in such a situation. Also it would be cheaper to host a Lemmy instance as the prices of hosting the instances that build up Lemmy are divided.