Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they’re going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?
No single instance should get to the size of 100 million users if we are doing federation correctly.
So don’t run large instances. Either selfhost at home if you’re on symmetric fiber or use cheap ARM cloud instances.
You are not supposed to have large instances. This is a self inflicted problem. The entire point of federated is to have many small instances and share the load.
Lemmy.world decided to accept more than 100k users. Ok fine, but the rest of the instances don’t have this problem whatsoever. We actually want more users on our instances.
And I knew this would happen. I was watching it grow and I knew eventually it would be a question about how to finance it, and I knew users would talk as if it’s a problem for Lemmy itself. It’s not, it’s a problem for Lemmy.world.
I mean sure, if it’s possible to only have ads for Lemmy.world users… Then go ahead and watch your ads. But I don’t think the rest of the instances want that experience.
Nope. Donations are enough.
Especially cost/donation ratio should get lower on large scale.
Limit instances to 2000 users. Rely on donations. Once the software will be mature enough, we will know exactly how much it costs per users. Users can even pay for others (I wouldn’t mind cover the costs for users I would know who could not afford it).
Ads require tracking to be valuable
i’d say 6-7k users would be a better figure, but i do agree with your overall point. anything above 10-15k just hurts the health of the federation in the long term and ends up creating “untouchable” servers. even worse on lemmy where communities are also bound to instances.
though now that i’m thinking about it, a better metric would be active users rather than total users
I just gave 2k because it seems that today it’s the sweet spot in terms of resources consumption, and thus cost. Maybe that can evolve in the future?
But thanks federation, that should not affect the experience too much. You could even imagine large instances such as LW having LWprime, LWsecond, etc.
