this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy

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I'm really enjoying lemmy. I think we've got some growing pains in UI/UX and we're missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this. I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn't going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?

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[โ€“] eekrano@lemmy.ml 9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is there an approximate specs per number of users guide to size a lemmy instance?

[โ€“] kinther@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I haven't seen one yet. Disk usage this morning on lemmy.world was reported at about 4GB over 11 days (probably low usage). The 100GB drive would probably fill up in 275 days or so if usage did not increment. If it's not redundant and dies, all that content is lost.

So storage will be a huge issue for lemmy unless I'm missing something.

[โ€“] nwithan8@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

100GB is practically nothing nowadays.

There are people (myself included, not to brag) running home servers with literally hundreds of terabytes of data. At that ~0.3 GB/day number, I alone could host 3,500 years worth of data. Get some of those r/DataHoarders and r/HomeLab guys on here and Lemmy would never run out of space.

Can content be stored somewhere like S3 instead of spinning disk? It would certainly be more robust and cheaper.

[โ€“] mer@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Yeah, I'd love to get an approximate sense of how much these instances cost

[โ€“] Pisck@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Unfortunately, you can't equate resource usage to number of users.

500 users will use more than 5 times the resources of 100 users, because activity feeds on activity. But it gets worse than being non-linear.

If you judge you're using as many resources as you comfortably can at 500 users and close registrations, you will soon exceed your resource capacity anyway. Why? Because users who register elsewhere will increase your federation activity and therefore resource requirements.