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Lemmy.ca runs on donations, It is ultimately up to the admins of each instance to decide how to monetize each instance.
Currently Lemmy.ca costs about 25$/mo to run. Although given all the growth that seems like it's out of date. You can donate here or here. Tallying up both donations reported values (remember that the donation site probably takes a cut) the instance makes 150 a month from 30 users, so we are more than set for the next little while.
yes, donations is my current plan.
someone mentioned in a different thread to contact CIRA and see if they will help like they did with mstdn.ca. I haven't yet looked into that yet.
Is there a document or post outlining how much an instance owner would be required to pay based on instance traffic?
Unlikely; every time a new version comes out, the data:traffic ratio will change.
For instance, they’re currently working to replace websockets. When that’s done, it should decrease data use while increasing responsiveness.
yeah, that's tough to say. on this instance, since I've moved to a new host (about 17 days ago), we're at almost 1TB of traffic, if that helps at all?
When the donations run out can we just put up ads? It would be the same reddit experience, but without the autocratic company trying to squeeze the money out of it.
there's no built in way to add ads in lemmy, even if I wanted to, and I highly doubt the devs would ever add that as a feature (just a guess).
So, the thing about the federated system, is that the server loads are distributed among the different instances that are run by individuals. This way, no one instance gets too big to afford to sustain itself.
But yeah, basically donations are what any instance will likely be run off of. I'm sure there will be people trying to profit off of it somehow, by charging people for accounts, maybe, at some point. Or running ads, etc. But as it is right now, I believe the idea is to have this system be free and sustained through donations.
*edit: The best way to get an answer to a question is to confidently post an incorrect answer and let someone correct you. :)
It's not quite that straightforward. There's some non linear network effects -- as more communities emerge, each instance is likely to be pulling content from more and more communities. Thus the storage costs along will baloon, and the instance to instance communication will baloon, but not necessarily scaling with user count. It's not likely to be scalable in the long term, if my math is correct.
It'd be like each subreddit having to make a copy of the entire reddit database, over the network, to participate in reddit. Works on a small scale. Fails badly if the community is too large.