Goddess Terrace Cafe might fit.
Goddess Terrace Cafe might fit.
They’re monkeys, give em some slack.
My thinking was: Setting up the software and keeping it running when a horde of users storm it (exhausting CPU and IO) are different things. Software (in general) sometimes behaves very strange at scale. I haven’t seen the source of Lemmy, and given that it’s written in Rust makes me feel positive about it, but strange things will(!) happen, and then you need professionals.
Given all their automations, I reckon they could pull it off.
Put up a yearly donation drive (like Wikipedia) but unlike Wikipedia do:
Ideally the donations will be handled through a non-profit org dedicated to this particular purpose. If the donation level is high enough, developers can be hired to further improve the source code. Currently the funds are managed through OpenCollective, but with enough growth this may not be feasible any longer.
This will most likely lead to heated debates as this will build a somewhat centralized organization, which necessarily comes with power concentration.
Moderation will probably be done by AI in the future. It’s probably just a bit too expensive still.