Lemmy.world grew from about 51k users when third-party reddit apps started to shut down to about 84.8k users at the time of this post.
Definitely felt some growing pains in the past few days, but it's great to see the platform more active now that things have become more stable.
So, welcome reddit expats!
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
Do you know if costs scale linearly with user count?
It does not. It in large part scales with the amount of content the local and federated communities. So because many users will subscribe to many of the same communities, more users will add less extra cost aftter a point. This is a bit simplified though as it also scales with users but to a lesser degree from my understanding.
Disclaimer: I'm not hosting myself just to be clear but this is what I have gathered from answers to similar questions as well as my own experience as a software dev.
just a wild a guess. will it should be more dependant on bandwidth and traffic than users. posters on c/cats are more demanding than posters of c/news in terms of ressources and bandwidth. text is lightweight compared to image oe gifs.
For sure. Larger userbase also increases likelihood of more and bigger donors, however, so the critical question is whether that revenue increases at a higher or lower rate than server costs.