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this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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I don’t know if that’s the best way to frame the argument. It’s not about keeping this place “small and unimportant”, it’s that by now we’ve all seen what happens when websites like this get big.
Reddit started out as “it will always be free, and we’ll never mess with your personal data or shove ads down your throat” too. That’s just not sustainable when you start dealing with tens of millions of users and billions of page views a day. Hosting the servers capable of supporting the traffic alone will cost tens of millions of dollars per year.
In other words, if Lemmy gets as big or as popular as Reddit, it will get just as shitty and corporate as Reddit. Guaranteed.
The whole point of Lemmy being open source and federated is to prevent just that
So being open source and federated means server space will be free forever? Interesting hypothesis.
There is no single entity in control of Lemmy. If an instance starts showing you ads, switch to an instance that doesn't. If the developers change something in the code that makes it shit, someone will fork it. It doesn't have anything to do with how much it costs to run an instance. The more people use Lemmy, the more instances there will be and the more users an instance has, the more donations it will get.
There could come a point where the only way to sustainably host a lemmy instance would require some sort of commercialisation. Since hosts are the people who actually decide what users get served, they are in control.
Of course you can always fork the software but someone still needs to host that fork. If the popular instances all had ads or other malware to sustain themselves financially and alternative instances without malware existed, everyone would flock to those alternative instances. If those alternative instances couldn't find a way to fund that load, they'd simply die.
I don't see this as a given. I also don't see it as a given that donations and costs would rise equally.
The problems aren't as pronounced yet because Lemmy as a whole is, in social media network terms, very small (3 orders of magnitude difference compared to the incumbents). If growth continues, the point will certainly come where we will outgrow the size that can be reasonably funded by nerd donations.