I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.
I’m posting from a self hosted server running on a raspberry pi! While no long term test has been carried out yet, it’s really snappy :3
I wonder how the network will scale if more and more would self-hosts small instances with just 2-4 users. If it would decrease load or increase load on the instances that hold popular communities.
I’m pretty sure it’s a net increase in load, saying this from my own small instance here. I don’t want to primarily use the big instances - that’s why I started my own. But lemmy.world encompasses so much that any load I would’ve prevented by subscribing to communities outside of lemmy.world is probably negated by lemmy.world already being subscribed to that community. And even if we’re just counting lemmy.world content, pretty sure it’s a net increase because browsing lemmy.world just shows aggregate votes and paginated lists. When federating they’re sending everything, even the 90% of stuff I and my users never even see. I wonder what the tipping point is, where the load of federating communities is outweighed by the load saved by not constantly reloading lists and whatnot. I bet it’s at least 10.
EDIT: Also wanted to add there’s proposals for how to spread out the load without having to switch protocols or anything. I certainly wouldn’t mind my own instance being used to forward stuff on.
I agree, I would like to contribute cpu and memory from my instance to the Lemmy network somehow, without users needing to have an account on my instance.
But it doesn’t work that way currently. Lemmy.world became the largest instance and then we have hundreds of small ones hardly being used at all.
Smaller instances cannot be trusted to have good uptime. For me I have to go down if there is a thunderstorm, need to unplug everything >.< So would need to save individual data to 2-3 smaller instances for it to be reliable.
I hope there might be a community and user transfer functionality. Could spread the load over the currently well hosted but low pop instances. Right now you need to stick with the instance you choose for all eternity :< forever and ever
