We had a few really huge days in 2023, but other than those, it seems like the growth so far in March is definitely outpacing our initial wave of new users in 2023.

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Our servers are currently in Finland, but this is subject to change if necessary for financial/technical reasons. We’ve also used German servers in the past for example. In general we’re definitely staying in the EU, though.

Well, one advantage we have over commercial social media is that they need to pay people to write code and maintain the infrastructure, but a lot of work on Lemmy is volunteer-based.

Many admins for bigger instances are basically on-call the whole year for free, open source contributors provide code for free, etc. Even the core maintainers are effectively losing money by working on Lemmy, because while they are getting some income, the sum of money they are getting from working on Lemmy is way smaller than what they would get if they worked typical software engineering jobs.

Basically, if any non-volunteer organization wanted to replicate Lemmy, it would cost them quite a bit more in terms of payroll alone.

Another aspect is scale - Lemmy is able to spread the costs between different instances, and while growth of the network can generally increase costs for individual nodes, they will still end up paying less compared to if they were hosting the entire social network in a centralized way.

We have about 3.3k monthly active users. This is based on users who at least vote/comment/post once a month, so it doesn’t include lurkers. But yeah, in terms of just infrastructure costs, we’re at about 6 cents per active user per month.

We’ve been stable just around 200€ per month for most of this year (it fluctuates up and down a little bit depending on exact usage). I update https://status.lemm.ee/ once every month with expected running costs for that month, and while it hasn’t changed much in the past months, if it does ever change, you’ll find up to date info there!

Hey, are you sure you’re not misinterpreting the votes? There was a small minority of users in favor of federating, but the majority was against it.