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How are we going to pay for all this?
(sh.itjust.works)
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Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.
Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.
It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.
That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.
Yeah exactly. If my instance stickies a post asking for donations, I'd throw them a couple bucks. No doubt