They came up with a system that turns outrage into cash and they’re literally printing money right now.
Viewers like you.
Donations
Many small server instances are paid for out of pocket (you can make your own too, about $60/year renting a cloud server and $10/year for a domain name). Bigger servers rely on user donations.
The Lemmy software development relies on donations as well, but they also receive grants from NLNet. Some of the grants are tied to accomplishing specific features. Third party app developers generally rely on donation support as well, if they’re not doing it just for the fun of it. Unsupported projects tend to get dropped after a while, though, so money does help keep up motivation.
My single user instance cost almost zero.
Self-hosted on my hardware that already used to host other stuff. Cpu overhead seems negligible, and network bandwidth is free (=already paid for). Disk space is nothing compared to my Linux ISOs collection.
I’ve been thinking of self-hosting a server (and some other stuff)for a while. I hope you don’t mind that I post this comment just so I (hopefully) can try getting back to you for tips when I get around to buying the hardware.
Bot at all, here is my wiki where I wrote down how I did https://wiki.gardiol.org/doku.php?id=services%3Alemmy its for my own memory and benefit, but shared for others who might need it.
https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy#support--donate (Lemmy development) or check the sidebar of a specific instance to see if they accept donations toward hosting costs.
