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?
The good thing is: Free development can an does happen (see Linux!). Hosting seems to be the main issue. An ideal solution would be each instance having a capacity limiter, which automatically redirects a % of content to other instances if it becomes to much. Is this possible?
Development of Linux is in large parts paid for by big corporations. Just look at the @reddit.com, @ibm.com, etc. email addresses of the commiters. Development is expensive and developers working full-time have to eat too. You can only go so far with only volunteers. It can work, but is not guaranteed to be sustainable.
At some point you need to have dedicated developers working on the code-base, because scale (more users) grows demand (of features).