Seriously, its a thankless job. Its so nice keeping the fediverse free in 2025/26.
now go forth and donate to the infrastructure, because renting hardware is not free.
but only if you are able to do so.
how much does it cost to host a lemmy instance
Relative to other Fediverse software it is expensive due to how much community federation and vote traffic drives up compute and storage needs.
The exact costs really depend on your location and if you are renting a server or run it on your own hardware. But I doubt you can run a well federated Lemmy instance for much less than 30€/month. Of course it initially runs on a much cheaper VPS, but once you start subscribing to remote communities it quickly needs more power and storage.
Late and maybe a hot question, but would it be possible to have a lemmy/piefed sans voting?
Basically removing the karma altogether, really. Or to have the votes saved on your device, or that they delete after a month, and only the aggregate votes are kept, until a year after?
Piefed does that partially. It also aggregates votes to send them in batches which is apparently saving server resources, but sadly it only works between Piefed instances and not with Lemmy.
Not nearly as much as it “costs” to admin and moderate one.
