Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car's gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.
About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord "server." Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren't doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.
Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn't afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.
I never knew CTH got banned from Reddit, holy shit. Y'all out there doing the lord's work supporting your community like that. Seriously, hats off :)
We were too good at posting. It just wasn't sustainable.
That's weird, your username isn't displayed for me, just your profile pic
For the uninitiated, they were closed because people would not stop posting photos of John Brown (1800-1859) after being warned that this wasn't acceptable. Such bullshit.
Here's one perspective: https://runyourown.social/
Personally, I run a Mastodon+Hometown server for around 100 people and it costs me about $30/mo. It costs me more to fill my car's gas tank. I could maybe start a patron or something, but at this stage, it is not even necessary.
About 3 years ago, I was a member of r/ChapoTrapHouse, which got banned from Reddit. The day after this happened, we had over 10,000 people sitting in a lifeboat Discord "server." Within the community, we had the experience and willpower to take Lemmy, kick the tires, make a couple adjustments which were necessary for our community, and make sure we weren't doing malpractice by hosting it. This all happened before Federation had been implemented in Lemmy.
Maintaining the fork was labor intensive, and a lot of the original developers burned out. We couldn't afford wages for development (the site still only exists due to volunteers), but the hosting costs were easily covered by user donations.
I never knew CTH got banned from Reddit, holy shit. Y'all out there doing the lord's work supporting your community like that. Seriously, hats off :)
We were too good at posting. It just wasn't sustainable.
That's weird, your username isn't displayed for me, just your profile pic
@PorkrollPosadist @flashgnash Chapo, I still miss that.
For the uninitiated, they were closed because people would not stop posting photos of John Brown (1800-1859) after being warned that this wasn't acceptable. Such bullshit.