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by icapybara 1095 days ago
The top post on the most well known Lemmy instance (Lemmy.ml) is an announcement from the server admin that Lemmy.ml is now running on a dedicated machine, with 6 cores and 32 gb ram.

Good for them, but this is supposed to be the Reddit replacement? A forum that was, until recently, just running on some guy’s computer? I know there are other instances but are there any serious ones?
1 comments
jonathanyc 1095 days ago
Hacker News ran on a 2 core machine with 128 GB of RAM :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9222006
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icapybara 1095 days ago
Sure but Hacker News in 2015 isn’t on the scale of 2023 Reddit, and isn’t being pitched as an alternative to 2023 Reddit…
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jconnop 1095 days ago
Any reddit alternative needs time to mature and grow, the migration can't happen overnight.

Unfortunately, unlike when we had Reddit already growing when the Digg exodus happened, there doesn't seem to be any pre-grown option this time around.

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Gareth321 1095 days ago
Alternatives don’t just appear out of thin air. No one’s going to purchase a huge server farm for a small user base. As Lemmy instances grow, more servers will be purchased. It happens organically.
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hcks 1095 days ago
Purchased with what money? People who migrated did so because ads are evil and 2$ per month is extortionate.
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Gareth321 1095 days ago
It's not $2 per month to the end user. Reddit wants to charge the wholesaler $2.50 per month. The developer needs to keep the lights on, so they need to charge more than that. There are server costs for Apollo, tech support, accounting, refunds, etc. Apple and Android take their 15-30% cut. The developer indicated a break-even price of between $5-$7. I'd be perfectly happy to pay $2/m for Reddit, and I'm happily donating to kbin.social to keep them running. The interface is much better than Reddit. Despite the lack of funding, their incentive is to create a great user experience.

It's important to remember that that $2.50 Reddit is charging isn't their cost. They're a business and they're baking in a health profit margin on that. The actual cost to them is a fraction of that, though of course they will never disclose the actual amount.

You might recall that back in 2000 we didn't have Reddit. It was lots of little forums hosted on machines in basements and with relatively cheap online hosts. Lemmy and Mastodon allows us to do that again, but this time, they're all connected together. This distributes costs across hundreds of thousands of people, instead of trying to make one giant platform the only choice.

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