I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
I suspect reddit’s reported unprofitability isn’t due to the cost of hosting, but from blowing money in other ways.
Any “good” corporation is supposed to be “unprofitable”, i.e. investing all their income into future growth.
And if you believe that the money you invest in your business will outperform usual loan interest rates, then it also makes sense to take out loans for even more growth, since then loan interests will be paid by future profits that compounds from the growth you get by taking out the loan.
Of course, usually that doesn’t work, so the CEOs and whoever tries to cash out before the eventual crash.