People! It’s open-source and community driven effort.
Lemmy is a software that can be hosted by anyone. So people just buy servers and run Lemmy instances on them. Of course, if a server has more members, it would require more hardware to run. So either upgrade the server to facilitate more users, or admins can stop the signup process.
People can also donate for maintenance of the server.
Each instance/server is being paid by the people that launched it / manage it. It’s cheaper to have several smallish instances than a few big ones, so take your favourite server flavour and create the account there. You could also create a small aws container shielded by cloudflare and linked to S3 or whatever and create a server for you and friends, it should cost around 15 ish euros a month which can me a shared cost, idk. Or simply donate to the server you belong to, or don’t, whatever floats your boat.
I subbed to the lemmy.world patreon a few weeks ago :) gotta help @Ruud pay for his experiment. It also helps to remember he only started this server on June 1st and the Lemmy code is under constant development as well.
A mixture of everybody. Right now the service is new, so people are being really good about donations. There are also contributions from charities like the OpenCollective which are meant to help the development of these FOSS communities. As we hit the six months or one-year mark we may see some instance owners attempt monetization as donations dry up, and I remember that my favorite app Boost served ads in the free version to fund development which its Lemmy version may continue to do, but as long as there’s interest and community here the servers will stay up.
I want to believe, but who’s paying the hosting bills?
People! It’s open-source and community driven effort.
Lemmy is a software that can be hosted by anyone. So people just buy servers and run Lemmy instances on them. Of course, if a server has more members, it would require more hardware to run. So either upgrade the server to facilitate more users, or admins can stop the signup process.
People can also donate for maintenance of the server.
Each instance/server is being paid by the people that launched it / manage it. It’s cheaper to have several smallish instances than a few big ones, so take your favourite server flavour and create the account there. You could also create a small aws container shielded by cloudflare and linked to S3 or whatever and create a server for you and friends, it should cost around 15 ish euros a month which can me a shared cost, idk. Or simply donate to the server you belong to, or don’t, whatever floats your boat.
I subbed to the lemmy.world patreon a few weeks ago :) gotta help @Ruud pay for his experiment. It also helps to remember he only started this server on June 1st and the Lemmy code is under constant development as well.
I am. Started my monthly OpenCollective contribution yesterday.
A mixture of everybody. Right now the service is new, so people are being really good about donations. There are also contributions from charities like the OpenCollective which are meant to help the development of these FOSS communities. As we hit the six months or one-year mark we may see some instance owners attempt monetization as donations dry up, and I remember that my favorite app Boost served ads in the free version to fund development which its Lemmy version may continue to do, but as long as there’s interest and community here the servers will stay up.