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?
I’m really worried about the technical scalability of all of this, though. As far as I understand it, as soon as someone from an instance joins a community somewhere else, the instance the user is on will have to mirror all posts from the source instance, so running your own instance could become prohibitively expensive if Lemmy became more popular. I feel like this is not as much of a problem with Mastodon, where you only follow individual users, so there’s less to copy over with each.