Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I'm curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don't see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

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[–] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Admin of a tiny instance with some somewhat active communities here. Monetary cost is almost zero because my lemmy instance runs on my own hardware. It uses around 250mb of ram and 50gb of storage which is pretty much nothing. Im currently not looking for any sort of donation

[–] heygooberman@lemmy.today 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost? And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations? What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?

[–] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 4 points 1 year ago

Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost?

I currently dont have open registration without me confirming every entry application so uncontrolled growth isn't really possible. Ill probably close registration as soon as there are too many people for me to host the instance in my basement. I would probably set up a donation page if I paid more than like 30 bucks a month for hosting.

And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations?

Donations seem to work fine on big instances like lemmy.world . Not sure about smaller ones tho

What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?

I hate ads and everything that tries to shove them down my throat. Most people on lemmy are somewhat tech savy and are probably already using an adblock. So ill make the experience a lot worse for a small amount of people without adblock and wouldnt be getting much money.