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.
To give you an idea, Beehaw’s annual costs are around $12,000: https://opencollective.com/beehaw. AFAIK they have been able to sustain that with donations. Beehaw has around 12,000 users, 4200 of those active per month: https://the-federation.info/platform/73
having a job on the side will help instance owners a lot
The better question is, how will lemmy survive if instances get too big. The whole point of the fediverse is to prevent centralization.
IMO we need self-imposed regulations that are community enforced. In the context of user count, the community should decide on an appropriate max active user count. Each instance should deactivate signups if they’re over the limit, and if they refuse, other instances should defederate them until they do. In general I’m not a fan of defederation, but I also don’t think we should defederate threads just because it’s owned by Meta. It should be defederated because it’s behavior is anti-fediverse.
That sort of thing should be a self-correcting problem to an extent - when performance drops, people will (hopefully) move to other intances. Also, a well-managed instance would stop accepting new members before it go to that point.
Also, there would be developers watching https://fediverse.observer to see if few registrations are open, but sign-ups are climbing in all open instances. Of course they are going to jump in if there’s an opportunity.
I think we’ll see a variety of servers with different funding models, similar to how radio and tv stations in the us can have a variety of funding models. NPR has a network of member stations that all carry their content (if the stations want, or they can get content from another station, or they can make it themselves).
Threads is an example of a federated service with a corporate funding model. I definitely think it’ll survive since they have as much money as Facebook wants to sink into it.
But we’ll probably also see servers that run on donations by a dedicated community.
If Threads is the NBC/CBS/ABC of the federated landscape, then those small servers will be like public radio stations, which operate on donations and the occasional government grant.
I think there are people who would chip in a little bit to fund a non-commercial server just the same as there are people who chip in money to NPR.
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.
