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?
Wikipedia is set up as a nonprofit. They have annual fundraising drives asking their users for money. They also have an endowment and receive grants.
A donation drive could be a good model but the decentralized nature of the platform would complicate things.
It doesn’t have to be that complicated. Your server’s admin ask for money, setup a method to receive donations (ex: Liberapay, Paypal, etc) and there you go.
If you raise more than you need, the community can vote to donate it to other communities in need, to the Lemmy or Kbin devs or to some charity.
when you donate money, you’re not funding wikipedia’s operating costs. wikipedia itself is self sufficient. what you’re funding instead is the wikimedia foundation- which is set up to not receive grants but to give them.
the drives are misleading, to say the least
If it is not funded through user donations, how is it self sufficient? Genuinely curious.
It doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be patreon pages for servers & instances you support, which is enough to keep the lights on. Especially if it unlocks a little cosmetic token or icon.
I really don’t care how to decorate my account as long as I can keep using the same service that I would want to use on a regular basis … I’d pay for the server and I really don’t care what they give me because the fact that they exist and continue to exist is more than enough repayment for me