How are we going to pay for all this?
I'm really enjoying lemmy. I think we've got some growing pains in UI/UX and we're missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn't going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
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Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
Can you elaborate? I have the impression, that we need to think more deeply about how the donations should be distributed. E.g. a users fund are donated proportional to their subscribed Communities? I think it's difficult, as people's time spent on a community doesn't necessarily mean it's proportionally valuable. I've had a few subreddits which I used rarely but we're quite important to me.
Each instance is free to field their own donation drives for their running cost. They even can display advertisements if they feel like it. There is no "one size fits all" here, and there shouldn't.
Each instance is potentially in a different jurisdiction, making it hard to transfer money, etc.
Not only that, but I think having funds centrally collected and then distributed is a particularly bad idea. It comes with too much opportunities for bad blood. Money and friendship don't mix.
The only unifying constant of the network is the software that runs it. This though needs to be improved in various areas, for which centrally collected funds would be ideal, as every instance will benefit from it. No operator of any instance would have a disadvantage from advertising the central donation drive. They would benefit from it by having better software in the end.