OP was taking about Tumblr, but I think it applies even more to the Fediverse: users need to develop an ethos of paying to support the sites they use. Otherwise advertisers pay the bills and call the shots.
If Lemmy would ever have 1/10 of Reddits user there would have to be larger instances. And even the “small” ones, would have to be large just in order to keep up with the amount of federated content. That’s not something you’d host on your 5 year old laptop.
Well they only need the content their users are subscribed to, not all content on the fediverse.
Sure. But most, if not all would need to fetch something like the 100 most popular communities, because they’re given to be subscribed to. Given a size of 1/10th of Reddit, that would be no small feat.
Add to that a couple of thousands of other communities (I mean I’m a single user subscribed to 150 communities). And my point is somewhat clear.
