This is an opportunity for any users, server admins, or interested third parties to ask anything they’d like to @[email protected] and I about Lemmy. This includes its development and future, as well as wider issues relevant to the social media landscape today.

Note: This will be the thread tmrw, so you can use this thread to ask and vote on questions beforehand.

Original Announcement thread

  • DessalinesOPMEnglish
    55•1 year ago

    If lemmy is working as intended (many small, connected servers), hosting costs should be small: like < $10 USD / month. (images are another issue, but I’ll answer that in other comments).

    Of course we don’t plan on adding any monetization directly into lemmy or its UI, including ads, or required payments. Right now at least the best way is to put donation links in your site sidebar.

    • HobbitFoot English
      26•1 year ago

      I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month, which is above your costs.

      Beehaw reports costs at over $500 USD/month.

      I would imagine lemmy.world is in the thousands.

      I know the idea is that there should be more instances, but we are already beginning to see server costs that are higher than what you think. User numbers seem to be settling down now, but who knows when the next spike will happen.

      • @[email protected]MEnglish
        58•1 year ago

        It depends where and how you are hosting. Hetzner or OVH have small VPS which can host hundreds of active users for those 10 usd. Of course if you host on AWS or Digitalocean its much more expensive. lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server. Hosting costs will also go down as the code gets more optimized.

        • DessalinesOPMEnglish
          60•1 year ago

          Yep. As ppl have mentioned, while our performance bottleneck is currently the unoptimized postgres operations, we haven’t even come close reaching postgres’s actual internal limits. So code and DB optimization will be the biggest factor reducing costs.

      • @[email protected]English
        10•1 year ago

        I’m on an incredibly small instance that self reports costs at about $18 USD/month

        If I really wanted to shoestring it, I could definitely get it lower. But I did want some headroom to grow, and to operate semi-professionally. With the recent upgrades we should be good for a while.

        (Also if anyone wants to jump to a small instance, thelemmy.club has some room :)

      • DandroidEnglish
        3•1 year ago

        I run an instance on a spare computer that I had lying in my house. If I had to guess, I would say running my instance probably costs less than a dollar per month.