Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Donations are indeed key, at least for the major sites with thousands of users and a lot of pressure on both infrastructure and administration. It is not profit-oriented, but it does need to be sustainable.
It seems, however, quite a few people are happy to make some voluntary contributions to keep the operation up and running. I have not yet heard of a Mastodon server shutting down due to a lack of funding. In the threadiverse, a lot of people have been donating a coffee to the creator of Kbin and Kbin.social (who will provide a better means of donating in the coming days), and lemmy.world is receiving hundreds of dollars every month at Patreon and Open Collerctive, to name a couple.
Once you put users in control, many of them are willing to pay for products that they would otherwise never have spent a dime on. Personally I have never paid for any piece of software (other than streaming services), but I try to make a round and donate to open source projects every year. :)
@sab What streaming services do you pay for? I’m all for supporting small indie studios, but Disney and the like can deal with me pirating their content.
@Reddugee @Kir @QuinceDaPence
Excellent question. I wish I had an equally excellent answer.
I reluctantly use Spotify. There’s a lot of things I don’t like about them, but at least they have an API allowing for some great open source clients (such as the GTK client Spot). Eventually I’ll probably resign to listening to online radios (FIP is a clear favourite!) and my Vinyl collection (which is currently in another country).
I had Netflix on and off for a while, but stopped for a number of reasons. I have access to the Netflix of friends, but like everything else it seems to be getting worse every day. Thankfully there are some cinemas in town showing classic movies on a regular basis.
I guess I also pay subscriptions to Overleaf and Dropbox, both of which are necessary for work.
As for companies like Disney, I agree piracy is far more ethical than a subscription.