

My question simply relates to whether I can support the software development without supporting lemmy.ml.
No. You can’t support Lemmy without supporting lemmy.ml because the developers use lemmy.ml for testing. They have not created a means for users to separate out their donations from one or the other.
That’s why others are suggesting you should just support a different but similar fediverse project like PieFed or Mbin instead.
I didn’t factor in mobile power usage as much in the equation before because it’s fairly negligible. However, I downloaded an app to track my phone’s energy use just for fun.
A mobile user browsing the fediverse would be using electricity around a rate of ~1 Watt (depends on the phone of course and if you’re using WiFi or LTE, etc.).
For a mobile user on WiFi:
In the 16 seconds that a desktop user has to burn through the energy to match those 2 prompts to chatGPT, that same mobile user would only use up ~0.00444 Wh.
Looking at it another way, a mobile user could browse the fediverse for 18min before they match the 0.3 Wh that a single prompt to ChatGPT would use.
For a mobile user on LTE:
With Voyager I was getting a rate of ~2 Watts.
With a browser I was getting a rate of ~4 Watts.
So to match the power for a single prompt to chatGPT you could browse the fediverse on Voyager for ~9 minutes, or using a browser for ~4.5 minutes.
I’m not sure how accurate this app is, and I didn’t test extensively to really nail down exact values, but those numbers sound about right.