Asklemmy

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What would happen to Lemmy if lemmy.world or lemmy.ml ran out of funds to continue hosting and decided to shut down their services? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[+] [email protected] -6 points 7 months ago (4 children)

This is why I think there needs to be a way to recoup costs besides donations. Having a blended income is a good thing.

Donations, subscriptions, “gold”, maybe a light sprinkling of ads or sponsors, and even a paid api for LLMs to scrape.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago

Ads and data scraping? If we can't survive without that I would rather go back to usenet, irc, and mailing lists etc.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Donations are the best way to keep all the Lemmy instances running.

If every active user donated just $5 a month, Lemmy would be able to thrive for years to come.

If Wikipedia can do it, why can't Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Not sure if this comment was supposed to end with /s or you actually unintentionally just listed the classic Reddit scenario.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Reddit did it wrong. Here’s how I would do it:

register as a non profit
determine the per-user cost and make it available for the user to see it.
create a “show me ads” toggle for the user to enable. Indicate how much this covers their cost.
create a “sell my content” toggle and indicate how much this covers their cost.
create a donation field.
recalculate the numbers and prompt the user to make changes on a monthly basis.

It’s possible that enough donations would cover the entire cost of operations. In that case, as a non-profit it would be necessary to stop selling out the users when costs are covered.