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There’s a financials post here: https://beehaw.org/post/416496

And near the bottom of this page you can see the donations made, the money actually spent, and their current balance: https://opencollective.com/beehaw

I… can’t see anywhere where they are complaining? This was just a post about how much the server cost to run. They updated it over time with new numbers as they beefed up the server capacity. But the post basically says “Here’s how much it costs to run, and we have plenty of money”. I don’t see the complaining?

Does the Lemmy license prevent corporations running nodes? In fact, it doesn’t even have to be Lemmy.

If you think about email, it’s widespread and used by everyone; but it is still mostly ruled by corporations (Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Outlook/Hotmail) for the average personal user. The protocol is open but the servers are run by different corporations each with their own UI. I’d guess there’s probably no reason we won’t end up like that some day, with some corporation creating a big social network with proprietary code, that happens to work well with ActivityPub so they have heaps of content and users on day 1, getting over that common initial social media hurdle (that none of your friends use it).

I mentioned Lemmy on Mastodon and some people noted some controversy surrounding the “main” instances. I don’t know exactly what concerned people

One of, if not the most active lemmy instance is a Marxist, pro-Russian war, pro-CCP, pro-North Korea community. When I signed up on lemmy.ml a while back, it was almost all you saw.

The problem with reddit alternatives is that, until now, the only people leaving reddit were the ones kicked off. They needed new homes and they found them in unmoderated communities they could host themselves, like lemmy.

Some of us have been waiting for some time for more “average” redditors to make the move, so this exodus is like Christmas coming early.

The difference with the Digg to Reddit exodus is that the two communities were rival competitors working in the same space. It wasn’t a case of one being a huge monolith that everyone used and the other being a small unknown, they were more evenly matched and reddit already had plenty of content and community, and neither were household names.

The situation today is very different. If Lemmy takes off, which I hope it does, it will likely still be small compared to reddit. A bit like how young people are fleeing facebook for other platforms, but there’s still no platform actually displacing facebook.

80/20 rule.

When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.

The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.

If you’re in the 20% that isn’t covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it’s just not where the effort should be focused.

So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?

You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).