this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Cost of revenue is $45.9 Million per quarter, so ~$15.3 per month. That's even less than the administrative cost. And again, this certainly includes the salary for everyone working on running the services, including admins, content moderators, support and so on, and that's going to be much, much less than the pure cost of hosting. (Yes, they outsource some moderation to volunteers, but certainly not all of it.)
15.3 million is the same order of magnitude as 10^7^. I don't see what the issue is with saying the cost of hosting is "on the order of 10^7^" here, unless you somehow think they are spending US$5 million a year on salaries of people who are directly involved in the provision of the product to the users? That would be US$60 million a year or enough to pay 600 people a six-figure salary, which I guarantee their employees are not all so well-paid.
Include the salary for admin and mods in the figure for lemmy and we are not at 10^3 for Lemmy either. The figure for lemmy includes only the pure hosting cost, while the figure for Reddit involves a ton more.
Reddit has 2233 full-time employees. If only half of them are working on the product, and you take $60mio a year as the budget, that would be $53700 per year and would include taxes, benefits and all that. Doesn't strike me as an unrealistic salary, for people like admins, mods, support, devops, provisioning and all that.
Remember, we don't have "hosting costs" as a figure for Reddit. We have "Cost of revenue" and that includes anything that goes into running the site. We can't compare numbers that we don't have.
Based on the fact that four times as much was spent on R&D, and almost three times as much was spent on sales and marketing, and even administration spent 50% more, I'm pretty confident that most employees are not working on "cost of revenue".
Your bringing up admin salaries is a perfect example of economies of scale. You can easily mind a 1,000,000-user community with ten or twenty moderators. But 10,000 users still need at least two or three people minding them. Anecdotally, smaller online public groups seem to have more troublemakers per capita, to an extent.
Since the admin salaries aren't counted in the .world figure, it doesn't matter how well that scales. That's why we are trying to take them out of the equation.
Regardless of the actual numbers for reddit (which we plainly just don't have), we do have numbers for plain old forums (e.g. phpBB) which provide a very similar service as Lemmy. And these numbers are far lower that what the .worlds pay.
The main issue here is replication. Each instance needs to store everything of all instances. That requires a ton of storage and that's not for free. With a network of conventional forums you don't have that issue.
Or to put it differently: If Lemmy was the size of Reddit (1.2 billion monthly users or roughly 32000x the size of Lemmy right now) and the number of instances scaled accordingly, there would be about 11.6 million instances, each hosting a copy of almost all the content. That's a crazy amount of replication that increases the cost for everyone enormously. Because not only are there more instances that need to pay hosting costs, but the costs for each instance balloon as well.
But there's an even bigger issue with the replication: Since everything is replicated, the owner of an instance can get into legal trouble for illegal stuff hosted on the instance, say e.g. illegal kinds of pornography or e.g. in the UK any kind of age-restricted content if they don't do age verification.
That means an admin can't just rely on other instances doing their modding correctly, but effectively every instance needs to moderate all federated content too.
That is a strain for 40k users (enough strain to e.g. close down lemmy.ee), but it becomes entirely unmanageable for 1.2 billion users.