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 wonder if the storage costs could be reduced, over the long term anyway, by having a setting to automatically delete anything older than a certain amount of time, configurable by the owners of a given instance. So an instance with ample funding or good hardware could disable it, and one that has enough drive space for about 3 years worth of posts could set that length of time for how long something lasts. Probably also would want a way for an instance admin to mark a posts as permanent and exempt from deletion. Would be a shame to lose that older content, but if reddit is any indication, anything people want to see again will likely get reposted anyway, and it would be preferable to losing an instance to rising storage costs. I imagine it might also make search a little better by having less to look through, though tbh I’m not sure how search algorithms work so I don’t know how much that would help them if at all.