It honestly doesn't seem that expensive based on others talking about their hosting costs. The bigger instance will be more expensive but they would also have a lot more people who can easily handle the cost without needing external funds. That said some instance will go that way not for the server cost but for simply money in their pocket at which point you can just switch to another instance.

[–] pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gets more expensive if you strart a successful meme community with lots of data. Some big Mastodon servers already store gigabytes per hour. Even with Cloudflare the expenses can soon get pretty high.

But yes, everything else with Lemmy is just a few euros a month.

[–] astral_avocado@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I still don't understand why they aren't just utilizing imgur and that catbox hosting service exclusively. Plenty of image/gif hosting options.

[–] pimeys@lemmy.nauk.io 3 points 1 year ago

The current default installation, especially if using Ansible, doesn't use any commercial image hosting services. You need to go out of the golden path to do so.

Even using an S3-compatible host is not in the default path: the files are stored to the server file system. So, yeah, maybe this is the reason. And of course, giving your content to a commercial entity is something people in the fediverse doesn't like that much. Wasn't the idea to get rid of these entities that can just be bought by a billionaire asshole and suddenly killing your community.

[–] sickpusy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Any estimate on costs? Round figures?

[–] xavier666@lemm.ee 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My lemm.ee instance costs around €150-200 per month (as per our admin) which is a medium sized instance but it is extremely well maintained. But it's certainly not 100s of millions of dollars, that's for sure.

[–] RogueTyre@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

Someone made a thread specifically for that a while ago but don't remember where or what the name was, sorry

[–] icepuncher69@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Here's hoping it stays sane and corpo free for a long time