Lemmy has so far made $0 total profit. So that makes them substantially more profitable than Reddit.
this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2023
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Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
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The idea is to remove profit motive, and distribute the actual costs to the users or admins.
Same way as any enthusiast could have run their own BBS back in the day. The perk now is they're linked together.
I would be shocked if it stays like that forever everywhere, but since the early days there's generally been some way to eat the cost.
it is more sustainable to pay for your small chunk of a network than to pay for a monolith that encompasses everything
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I know you probably have seen a lot of answers from others already and my answer would probably be the same as others (for obvious reasons) but I am going to answer anyway because you told me not to lurk. Please note that I am not an expert (or even somebody who knows much about business) so don't expect my answers to even be half correct.
If by profitable you mean "not making a loss" then probably yes as long as if there are enough donations to cover the expense of running the server.
But if by profitable you mean "making enough money to be sustainable long term" then my answer would be most likely not because it's not designed to make money (unlike ahem...certain platform)
Personally, I like the way the haiku project does it. They have a bar with how much they need on the website and as they get more donations, the bar starts filling up. I think the most important thing is to be transparent about your costs.
That’s exactly what Reddit used to do.
Perhaps I'm totally wrong as I'm new around here but isn't the whole point that's it is decentralized and servers are administrated by user groups? There is supposed to be little to no monetary ensentive.
They aren't, and due to the type of culture that is common here many users are outright hostile to any monetization other than charity. mastodon has had instances being defederated for the crime of attempting to introduce advertising or subscription.
It remains to be seen if this changes, but for now you're unlikely to start a fediverse instance for profit.
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I believe Lemmy makes money like Wikipedia does for now
I'm not sure there is one answer here. I guess it all depends on the instance. Also consider that it's pretty early on, some instances might ask you money to join, others might ask for donations and yet others might show ads or be completely paid for by the hoster. Having a small instance doesn't necessarily need to cost a lot.
Plot twist: not everything needs to be profitable.
Ok but it still takes funding. Servers cost money, admins time has a cost and they gotta make a living. So there has to be some self sustaining quality to it otherwise you're relying on peoples generosity to donate and having admins that might have to go days without checking things (and burn IT burnout is bad enough when you're getting paid. Plus if these people do similar for work the last thing you want to do when you get home is fix some server issue.)
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I run my own instance just because I want to build a community that people can enjoy. I do it out of my own pocket and don't ask for donations of any kind. Not everything is about profit for some people. If I were running a site as big as Lemmy.world, then I would consider it, but only to cover some expenses.
This. We need to stop seeing such online gatherings as opportunities to be profitable. I personally view them as social interactions and opportunities to exchange random and interesting information. Water cooler talks or forums (the ancient greek/roman sort - I wonder how many shitposts those had).
When you invite people over to your house for a gathering (also incurring costs - even if people bring something to cover the catering bit, you still have to clean up afterwards) you wouldn't consider it as an opportunity to profit right? (Or you are and are just hosting an MLM party or have some sort of agenda to push).