Lemmy

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Everything about Lemmy; bugs, gripes, praises, and advocacy.

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How is Lemmy going to make money? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago by buda@lemmy.ml to c/lemmy@lemmy.ml

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If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit's daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don't think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.

I know the goal of Lemmy isn't to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.

I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?

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[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

These are donations so there are no taxes. It might not be enough to get rich, but it's definitely enough to live. And I don't want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

Dessalines and I worked full time on Lemmy for the past three years and received around 2000€ per month. I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

[–] communick -1 points 1 year ago

And I don’t want people to work on Lemmy whose goal is to earn a lot of money, but those who are passionate about it.

How is that any different from employers that offer unpaid internships or a clients that ask newbie photographers to "work for the portfolio"?

No one is talking about "a lot of money" here. Whether you want it or not, you are expecting to get people to work for you (and you can call it a "co-op" all you want, whoever decides who-gets-how-much is the actual boss) for less than what they can get in the job market.

I even had to tap into my personal savings at times to continue.

Yeah, and this is a sacrifice that you chose to make. Which is totally fine. I also took some time to work on my own open source project long after the grant money was gone. I just don't get how you think it is reasonable to ask others to do the same.