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?
For people putting their time and hardware on the line for something like this there’s a few orgs we could look at as guidance, someone already mentioned Wikipedia collecting donations, they also open up to volunteers to to maintain the site.
There’s also the Blender Foundation. They make a FOSS 3D software with no royalties, no payments to use, no subscriptions, anything you create is yours to do with as you please. They are funded through donations big and small, but they also foster an extremely active community, making tutorials, creating plug-ins and addons often for free or super cheap (especially compared to paid software), and officially support various plug-ins made by the community. Because blender doesn’t have an explicit profit motive, the last few years since their 2.8x releases and into the 3.x era has made huge developments across their program that other paid 3d animation software companies are picking up and adding to their platforms.