As more and more people migrate to lemmy from reddit (just like i did), how will lemmy adapt to the people coming in and the cost incurred for hosting it. I imagine as more people start posting stuff just like they do on reddit, the cost on the server will increase. And as lemmy doesnt have any ads or tracking or anything of that sort, how will it cope up with this?

  • olivebuffalo@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I think donations can be sustainable considering wikipedia has done it for over a decade. People genuinely care about this fediverse project and donating a few dollars a month will probably keep this place growing and healthy. I also think we are too quick to predict the end of reddit. Millions will still use it while this place will remain almost unheard of to the average person for at least the next few years.

    • Maldreamer141@lemmy.mlOP
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      1 year ago

      Donation might cover up things, but the demand will only keep increasing as instances get big(?)

        • Sibbo@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          It may happen that the computational power required to run Lemmy increases superlinearly in the number of users. Then the amount that each user needs to donate would increase as well. But I’d expect if every user donates a euro a year, then server costs should be covered in any case.

        • Logan@beehaw.org
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          1 year ago

          I second this. Just donated $10 and this probably won’t be my last time donating either. I have hopes for Lemmy and I’m sure many people care about its development enough to donate.

      • Jediotty@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        I mean the more people that join, the more people that donate. Reddit never got a cent from me directly, but I donated to beehaw when I made my account, and I plan to do it again, as this is just a small (but getting bigger) community, not a company trying to make a profit. They definitely won’t be rolling in money but I think they’ll be able to make it(and I certainly hope so)

    • Anissem@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      For clicking the heart for donations, is their a platform lemmy prefers for the donations?

    • heartlessevil@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      What do you mean by retention? It has soft-deletion so data exists but is hidden; and due to the nature of federation, the deletion event can’t be guaranteed to reach and be respected by every server that was originally sent the data.

      • Maldreamer141@lemmy.mlOP
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        1 year ago

        Oh so once stuff are posted on lemmy, even if deleted by a user, it can still exist on other server?

        • nachtigall@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          Delete requests are propagated to other servers, but in theory they can ignore that. So not different from people scraping Reddit.

          • vinnymac@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            A good rule of thumb, is to assume anything you’ve requested or uploaded on the internet has been logged and saved by some third party. Really all one can do is mask themselves, so they appear anonymous. But otherwise we are all being tracked by the systems we are using at multiple levels.

            Delete buttons might as well be feel good sugar pills. Even with GDPR and other laws in place, companies make mistakes and may discover they stored your information illegally for years after a takedown request is submitted.