dogmuffins

Basically, volunteer code commits, volunteer admins, and donations for hosting costs.

Fosstodon is a pretty great example. It's a fairly large mastodon instance which makes enough in donation revenue to pass some on to other open source projects. It's not heaps ($600 in 2021), but I think it demonstrates that donations are a viable funding model. If things got tight I expect the community would meet the challenge.

It's not like you need to build a custom data centre - it's just renting a server, maybe even a VPS.

That said, of course the admins and mods are volunteers. I'd like to imagine that one day a few lemmy instances could charge a subscription fee for a premium, well managed experience.

I've found that if they don't show up in search, you can go directly to the url and subscribe there. After that it will actually show up in search here.

For example, if you find !whatevercommunity@lemmy.ml at browse.feddit.de, but it doesn't appear when you search communities for whatevercommunity, then you can go to the url https://lemmy.perthchat.org/c/whatevercommunity@lemmy.ml and subscribe there.

This has been a bit hit and miss for me though. I'm pretty sure it's supposed to work, but sometimes you'll get a 404. My guess is that it's because the initial request the perthchat instance makes to lemmy.ml might pull down a lot of data, and if lemmy.ml is under load it might drop the request.

I've noticed that communities from other instances don't show up unless someone is already tracking them.

It happened here at lemmy.perthchat.org when I was trying to find !selfhosted!selfhosted@lemmy.ml I think. Search for it (with 'all' selected), didn't show up, entered lemmy.perthchat.org/c/selfhosted@lemmy.ml in the url bar, subscribed, went back to search again and there it was.

Loads of people are spinning up their own instances for their own use. Or did you mean creating an instance for the community to use?

The situation in November with Fosstodon (Mastodon instance) & Twitter might be analogous.

Fosstodon had about 20k users, at the start of November, and more than 50k by the end.

There was definitely an initial surge of activity which diminished after a time, but it didn't return to it's previous level.

I don't have the data but the vibe is that the users to activity ratio stayed about the same, now 6 months on it feels like there's 250% of the activity that there was at the same time last year.

Of course loads of people are creating accounts here just to have a look but will probably never post, but there's also plenty of new users who will be engaged long term.