Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post.
Definitely felt some growing pains in the past few days, but it’s great to see the platform more active now that things have become more stable.
So, welcome reddit expats!
Unfortunately, the reality is that it may become necessary.
Donations can be a saving grace if enough people donate regularly. But such is dependent on people’s willingness, their own financial stability, and how stressed servers are (how much it’ll cost to upgrade and/or maintain infrastructure.)
It’s great if it’s viable. Means there’s less outside influence. But that’s if.
As far as I’m aware, Wikipedia has been able to maintain it purely off donations. But I’m not sure if Lemmy could.
Maybe? One thing Lemmy does have going for it is that the majority of users seem to be aware how… Fragile? the fediverses can be. There’s arguably more passion behind the users and maybe willing to throw support out.
But hard to say.
Most importantly: Lemmy instances are not being run for profit. There is no need to make exorbitant amounts of money to pay shareholders. Right now it’s enough to cover hosting costs, in the future you probably want to be able to pay a couple of people as well.
Commercial instances are not off the table, but I hope we can avoid it. If it happens, I hope it will not be about profiting directly from the users, but instead through e.g. professional services. Imagine a company that hosts instances for entities that are willing to pay (I see this especially in the microblogging/Mastodon space, where for instance governments want to run their own instance).
Or maybe nonprofit organizations. Though I’m having a harder time imagining why they’d need a social network site, especially if it’s federated with our shit posting “sublemmies” or whatever we’re calling them here.
NLnet already sponsors the development of Lemmy. They donate money when certain roadmap items are achieved (which has slowed down due to the efforts to make Lemmy scale). NLnet sponsors organizations and people that contribute to an open information society.
Places like Lemmy are not just shit posting. Just look at the immense value of the content at reddit. Google became so useless when the blackout happened. LLMs like GPT4 are trained for a large part on this human generated content. It’s absolutely vital that this information is not controlled by a handful large corporations as it is now. Federated social media could break this pattern and bring back a free and open internet.