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this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Fediverse
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I think there is a huge misconception many people have that a larger instance is more likely to stay around, but due to the nonlinear costs involved in hosting fediverse instances this is not true.
Basically there is a sweet-spot around a few thousand (~2500) members where costs are low enough for a single dedicate admin paying things out of their own pocket long term is possible, but also enough members willing to occasionally donate or contribute otherwise to cover costs.
To be honest, I know it's a controversial view, but I would almost like to see Ruud and the LW admins block registrations for a while, along with a communication "Have a look at those other instances, they are well managed, you can access all of Lemmy just as well from there"
I'm not looking forward to 5 years from now, where instances like this are the mastodon.social of federated reddit-likes. As much as they should block registrations, I don't think they will. ...but I have a hat on stand by, just in case I need to eat it.
I think they're stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they've done their bit for a while, and that's if they're still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.
My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It's a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn't have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn't mean it's well configured or secure either.
I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.
Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.
Interesting, I wasn't really thinking about this, I guess most of admins nowadays just prefer the convenience (including scalability) of a VPS.