this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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Really, the only direct cost of lemmy is the development. That's the beauty of lemmy's decentralized nature, the cost of actually running it is spread out among tech hobbyists with spare hardware and time (edit: and only ~$30/year or less for a domain name), or may even have some money to throw at new hardware. For most people, the connectivity doesn't incur any additional cost to whatever they're already paying for internet access.
There are plenty of free and excellent open source projects that neither charge money or generate profits, they're driven by passionate developers who give their and talent for the enjoyment of it and betterment of the community.
___Communities can get quite big, the big communities would be quite expensive to be hosted right?
I don't host any instances myself, but I have experience with web hosting in general. Yes, the hardware will need to scale vertically with more activity, but I don't know what lemmy's anticipated load thresholds are.
I would guess a decent i7 with an SSD and 16GB+ RAM would handle lemmy quite comfortably for a good while. So the expense isn't entirely trivial, but it's nothing compared to a centralized service with hundreds of millions of regular users.
HW gets cheaper. And prolly in big group will be some ppl who can donate. And we are going to experience burst of bots. One way how to fight them is pay little for posting. Or maybe we shutdown internet BCS of CO2. Everyone need to decide if they wanna pay with money or data, there is no free lunch.
Shut down the internet because of co2?!
While both HW and power gets cheaper (in the grand scheme of things), the consumption of natural resources does not. Data centers that run everything you do online consume a lot of power. That does not mean you need to stay offline or else the planet dies, but IMO, everyone should keep it in mind.
Hell, I'm already practically wasting a few domains already as is. Maybe some day I'll set up a subdomain with my own instance.