In the last weeks Lemmy has seen a lot of growth, with thousands of new users. To welcome them we are holding this AMA to answer questions from the community. You can ask about the beginnings of Lemmy, how we see the future of Lemmy, our long-term goals, what makes Lemmy different from Reddit, about internet and social media in general, as well as personal questions.
We’d also like to hear your overall feedback on Lemmy: What are its greatest strengths and weaknesses? How would you improve it? What’s something you wish it had? What can our community do to ensure that we keep pulling users away from US tech companies, and into the fediverse?
Lemmy and Reddit may look similar at first glance, but there is a major difference. While Reddit is a corporation with thousands of employees and billionaire investors, Lemmy is nothing but an open source project run by volunteers. It was started in 2019 by @dessalines and @nutomic, turning into a fulltime job since 2020. For our income we are dependent on your donations, so please contribute if you can. We’d like to be able to add more full-time contributors to our co-op.
We will start answering questions from tomorrow (Wednesday). Besides @dessalines and @nutomic, other Lemmy contributors may also chime in to answer questions:
Here are our previous AMAs for those interested.
How much would you be willing to pay for this? Im not sure if its worth the effort because its not clear if anyone else besides you would be interested, and it would require a bunch of work to setup. It would require an automated way to check donation status, and a way to build and distribute these private releases. Feel free to respond via private message.
I guess I wasn’t thinking about how much work it would actually be in order to enforce it. I doubt I could afford the cost. Maybe if it was coupled with a managed services type of deal and you had enough subsrcibers it could be enough to hire another staff member? It seems like adding “premium” features could alieanate the userbase unless it’s just cosmetic changes. I put my foot in my mouth bringing it up, sorry.
No worries that’s what the AMA is for. I thought about managed hosting before, but it would likely involve mainly support and sysadmin work, while my passion is programming.
You could always outsource and automate the basic troubleshooting aspects. Running updates accross multiple customers would be a breeze. I beleive I’ve seen one managed services company that will set up an instance and manage it for around $20/mo.
That would mean hiring someone, which requires initial funding like a bank loan. It is also necessary to get the funding and skill to setup a website, automate the hosting and most importantly run a marketing campaign. Otherwise no one will know about the service nor use it. So it requires setting up a whole business, do you know how to do that?
I always bootstrap business ideas without spending any or little money to start. Making a small thing on github that says “managed service, please contact for pricing” channel that through a virtual assistant to weed out the time wasters. If you get a lot of demand, then you scale up and flesh out complete automation.