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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • It’s hard to tell, because companies that make their money from ad revenue also spend a lot making their apps more addictive in order to sell you more ads.

    You can tell that they are making less than whatever their premium costs though, so for example YouTube makes less than $8/month selling ads.

    If people aren’t trying to sell you shit, and don’t have to make their website more addictive it’s relatively cheap to run, for example Wikipedia that has a pretty dynamic read/write load, get 11 billion unique devices a year on just the English site https://pageviews.wmcloud.org/siteviews/?platform=all-sites&source=unique-devices&start=2025-04&end=2026-03&sites=en.wikipedia.org which is about half of the page views: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/13/wikipedia-at-25-what-the-data-tells-us/ but spends ~$180m/year across all languages, so it costs about 1c a year/unique device if I’m doing my math right.

    Obviously some service like YouTube will cost more because it uses more bandwidth and Gmail will cost more because each user is served individual emails and spam filtering has always been CPU intensive, but the hardware costs are fairly minimal anyway (most of the cost is on staff), so if it wasn’t for the ads Google would have less staff and hosting their services would be much cheaper, maybe not 1c/year but almost certainly less than $1

    Obviously Lemmy instances are currently much smaller than reddit, but I’d bet by unique user count Lemmy instances are likely running far more effectively than reddit and likely in the sub dollar category.

    On the flip side if you want to make something a subscription only service you need to spend a bunch of money processing payments and subscriptions, probably more than the actual hosting costs.









    1. It came from a corporation so was designed by 1 guy not a committee and some people will never forgive it for that.
    2. The systemd suite is far more than an init system and keeps getting bigger, I genuinely think it’s just a matter of time until it has a mail retrieval service built into it.
    3. It offers clear benefits so even distros resisitent to depending on a tool when there are alternatives have adopted it
    4. It doesn’t pander to slacktivist on stuff like including an optional DoB field

    That’s about it, I find it kind of annoying sometimes as it messes with stuff I knew how to do (harden per-user-tmp partitions), but overall the benefits to distro maintenance must be worth it so I don’t worry about it too much.

    Much like the DoB stuff I find the pushback to it far more annoying than the actual inconvenience of sometimes not being able to configure a tweak how I’d like.









  • Copyright law only has teeth when it’s owned by corporations, but the cleanroom reimplementing technique does still seem to create a derivative product which in this layman’s opinion would still violate licenses like the GPL, but IANAL.

    In particular any open source software where it’s authors are making a living from donations or public support.

    The “good” news is this is pretty rare these days.

    Honestly the best defense is probably just writing maintainable software though, AI slop is going to be hard to maintain.