I know anyone can spin up an instance. So who is hosting lemmy.world, and how much are they paying for hosting? If this is going to replace r-word someday, it will need a lot of resources and money to keep it running.
The guy running lemmy world posts quarterly expense reports. You should find them through google.
IIRC, this instance is hosted on a dedicated hetzner server. They usually have auctions for them so you could host an instance for around $100 a month.
Can’t directly answer your question, but I can say that I’m responding from lemmy.ca, where the hoster has provided all that information stickied from the front page. We know who owns it, how he’s hosting it, what the data volume is, and how much it costs per month to maintain. As subscribers increase, so do the costs, and hopefully so do the donations.
No one instance is going to replace the digg successor; various instances will come and go over time, just like web sites or email hosts. Some will cost money to join, others will have various other requirements. And they’ll all federate with some but not all other lemmy instances.
This might give you a little info
Thanks! I read it just now, so one person is paying for hosting. Where is the money coming from, we can’t expect them to keep renting a dedicated VPS forever.
They have a bunch of donation sites set up so you can contribute if you like. Links can be found in their April/May financial report post.
https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update