How are lemmy and other fediverse platforms profitable?
Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors.
So... is it all based on donations?
Also don't just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
Agree, and such instances would be more resilient to federation issues. I think communities should be spread out on small instances, while users are concentrated on larger instances with better infrastructure.