I just discovered mander today and am super excited by it. At numerous points in my musings on lemmy communities, I have returned to the question of sustainability. This is what brought me to mander: the thought that an instance can shut down at any moment, so I sought to diversify. Now I am encouraging some of my favorite subreddits to migrate here, and I was confronted with the same question of sustainability. It was phrased a bit more bluntly: " who pays for it and for how long?"
When the means dry up, what happens? Is the server transferred to another “owner”?
Are the costs low enough that it can be supported by existing resources (assuming user donations and a generous “owner”)?
External funding: Wikipedia might be a good model to follow? Government funding? Surely some of us have written grants.
I really want to see something like this grow and prosper. However I also want to be sure it is worth the time for the contributors and that I have good answers to my favorite forums when presented with the above questions.
Onward!
I am an avid tech enthusiast. I think that lemmy as a project won’t outright kill/replace reddit ever, rather the influx of enough users will eventually build it into a platform of is own. Reddit might still exist down the road, some parts of it might even thrive, but lemmy is, as someone else put it : the first time in a very long time something new in the internet to get excited about.
I think in the immediate future the priority should be to bring more features to it, develope it into a robust ecosystem with all the necessary tools required. Currently it’s all janky and cumbersome to use, but the more tech focused crowd is putting up with it because we all are either excited by something new or we just lost our trust in reddit.
I think a short time down the road, there will be a lot of features that we cannot currently imagine. There’s speculation that users and even communities will be able to migrate. Currently it’s very difficult to find large communities on a topic so information is very fragmented. It’s also not too easy to find and subscribe to them.
But essentially, my hope is that development is fast enough, and that new user influx is large enough, that in few months to years time it will be possible for me to host an instance on my own pc/laptop. There I can make my own account or perhaps the accounts of my family/friends so that it always stays with me. I would then be able to bring all the communities under that umbrella.
As for larger communities, I think eventually we’ll end up donating to a pool for every particular community that we like. Maybe even organizations can bring their instances as well. And it would still work because no one has absolute control over everyone