If the reddit exodus happens and Lemmy gets even 2% of reddit’s daily active users, how will Lemmy sustain the increased traffic? I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate.
I know the goal of Lemmy isn’t to make money, but I know that servers and storage costs add up quickly. Not to mention the development costs.
I would love to hear the plans for how to offset those costs in the future?
When you say “go down” do you mean what happens if an instance shuts down its servers for good? I think the answer to that is not a technical one. If a sever is owned by an organization (not-for-profit) and it pays it’s cloud provider bills, it’ll stay up forever.
If you mean what happens if there’s a technical issue and the server data is lost, that’s a different and solved issue. Create database backups. Easy peasy.