Donations will work totally fine. If you checkout the Mastodon Patreon, they are getting 28k euros per month, and more through other platforms. With the way Lemmy is growing now, it should definitely be enough to pay the salaries for dessalines and me, and hopefully even take on more contributors.

Anyway lets wait how the Reddit blackout next week goes before discussing funding in detail. Things are still uncertain now.

When our open source grant from NLNet runs out at the end of this year, we will have to switch to full community funding, probably via yearly funding drives. Currently we only have two full-time devs, @nutomic@lemmy.ml and I, but could potentially add more to our little worker coop as we grow.

If you'd like to help us out, here's our donation page: https://join-lemmy.org/donate

Liberapay is much preferred, but the other ones work too. I'm sincerely grateful to everyone who has or is contributed, it really does make us feel like we're working on something worthwhile.

People do seem to donate sufficiently on the Fediverse. Of course the vast majority doesn't, but if one person donates 10€/month, that pays for hundreds if not thousands of users.

The entire cost structure is also different when you get a lot of volunteer labour and don't have to repay venture capital funders 3000% of their initial investment or so.

The good news is we've seen this before with Mastodon.

Not only did we see an influx of monthly donations, we saw admins expand the needs of their servers in real-time with the help of the community.

After having witnessed that in the midst of the bird migration, I have no concerns with how Lemmy will handle the inevitable influx when it comes to uptime and finances.

I'm not a programmer, but do you have something called an API? You could probably charge fees for that.

What happens to communities on instances that goes down? That's where I fear there will be real issues. Unless there's a way for one instance to properly adopt a community in another instance first.

Instances could maybe put up a Patreon with features such as voting to decide things related to the instance for example. There's plenty of ways to make money without VC.

Another idea could be making a bot that only works for people who donated, I don't know...

Maybe get funding from the European Commission or https://nlnet.nl/ or https://www.ngi.eu/ or something like that

I’m setting up my own instance now to contribute, and I think a lot of people might be willing to do so or similar. I pay for Internet search feature now at Kagi, and similarly I’m willing to pay for my social media (Reddit or Lemmy are the closest things to social media I use) to keep it stable and with less ads and data collection. I hope there are enough people like me that would rather pay a little than have all their data mined in nefarious ways.

Did mastodon die, without funding?

Well, it's working right now, isn't it? If the load increases n times and donations also increase n times, it will keep working just fine.

The idea is to try and offload the cost by driving users into other instances, as well as doing donation drives like how wikipedia or A03 do

also right as I typed this comment, a hilarious glitch happened where the upvoted shot up to like 370 lmao

If you think the point of anything in the fediverse if for profit, you've missed the point. It's federated, if it gets too many users to support itself, it will collapse into several smaller chunks.

The whole premise is built on the same concepts as the early web, it's interconnected, it's self-managing, and it will scale only until it can't and then it will peacefully split.