Lemmy is never going to handle an entire migration of reddit’s whole user base. Most redditors use the official app, and the mainstream audience for the platform now represents the largest user group. They’re not going to wholesale make the jump to Lemmy. That wouldn’t even be possible without widespread coordination of resources. Each instance can only handle so many users, so new instances will have to continually be created to accommodate influx. Theres no profit incentive either, meaning whoever is running the instance server is purely doing it out of their passion for the platform. That doesn’t scale linearly, there’s only so many people out there with the resources to run a large instance.

Measuring the cost isn’t possible. It depends on electricity and equipment costs which vary a lot. And the question doesn’t make sense either.

By not all ending up on the same server.

As everyone else has already said that’s a very good question, one that doesn’t necessarily have an answer, but Im not too concerned.

I’d point out (rather excitedly) that this really isn’t unlike how the Internet used to be up until the late 00s or very early 2010s and the rise of insta, FB, birdsite, digg and reddit. EVERYone had to shoulder hosting costs (unless you were on Geocities,Myspace then it was ads)

Yes, we’ve had bulletin boards and discussion forums since perl and CGI were a thing; each was self hosted at the hoster’s expense. Newsgroup and IRC servers too - THOSE all acted like “federated” instances - common newsgroups and chat channels would be synchronized and replicated from server to server EXACTLY how federated Lemmy/Kbin/etc. instances do it now.

And the infrastructure costs were a struggle then and they will be now. Back then to have a capable CGI forum host, or to colocate your server in someone’s data center it cost a lot - like decent hosting/co-loc plans started at $50/month and went up from there. Most hosting plans had steep bandwidth caps, think like 5GB included and +$5 per GB - if you hosted a popular site 40-50GB of traffic wasn’t abnormal. If you ran a newsgroup server you frequently had to futz with how long newsgroup msgs were retained to save disk space; like 48 hrs or less (then the data would be purged).

What you can get for $50/month THESE days is quite a lot more capable, and you can run a low retention instance for a lot less. Bandwidth and disk space are ludicrously cheap (at least compared to 10-15+ yrs ago). If your instance is low user, low community, and reasonable data retention/cloning, you could run Lemmy or a Mastodon or Calkey server on an old computer you have kicking around and host it from your home internet connection with a dynamic DNS mapping.

Obviously the big instances with gobs of users will struggle with how they pay for the server infrastructure - some will use crowdfunding, patrons, donations etc. Others will run ads, or subscriptions.

My home instance lemmy.ca is at 1400 users (as of right now) and is on a $25-30/month hosting plan and so far the site is doing just fine (or seems to be). I’d guess that a massive instance like lemmy.ml might be north of $1-200. But, if you think about it, all you need are 20 ppl to donate $10/month. I donate yearly to Wikipedia. As they discuss in this thread here https://lemmy.ca/post/599590 Mastodon gets $28k Euros a month in donations and pays for two? full time developers, so its not like there aren’t people donating to open source projects… and so far Fediverse servers are doing fine.

I’m running a barebones server for myself and a few communities (not many subs yet) which will run for less than a Starbucks coffee a month… (Assuming I don’t need more storage space… Lemmy seems pretty light. The main servers are gonna carry the load unfortunately… Beehaw.org had a transparency post about financials as of about a week ago they said something that their instance was costing like 50-75ish a month of I recall.

By not asking the same question every single day.

That’s why I’m running my own server. Mastodon is much bigger than Lemmy and it does fine with community run servers.

Don’t forget to make a donation to your instance if you love it. For most of us it’s a bit early but I give my 10 EUR per year to my Mastodon admin. Also, if you can choose instance ran by a non profit rather than a person as it ease the whole donation mechanism and give you the right to check where your membership due go.

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I bought a server for about 100 a year… With my whopping 2 users… It’s overkill… So… My comment is a wasted way of saying idunno

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It’s literally all donated

Reddit used to have something similar to health bar showing how much “gold” was bought to support the website. but later on out of greed they started using it as a paywall.

We can have a health bar that doesnt paywall ANY features and very transparently displays funds raised\used for a server. It can be used to display how much funds its being supported, how much server costs are, salaries for open source maintainers, mods, etc.

We ask u/spez for the money …

sell checkmarks like Tumbler.

for x$ a month get a checkmark next to your name on posts. in whatever colours you pay for. buy checkmarks for others.

Personally I plan on donating the price of Reddit Premium to my instance owner