Fediverse

Do you really think Lemmy could handle the amount of people that Reddit has?

yup. no question. Not one instance mind you, but Reddit is also a giant cluster. (and clusterfuck)

As far as I know the existing instances are usually running on capacity and always in need of donations,

We just need the big bois to stop stuffing themselves. There's 0 reason to have 2/3 of the totally traffic flooding into world because people are scared of Federation that they never even have to deal with.

Maybe Lemmy would benefit of some way to get people to pay, such as purchasing the ability to give people awards etc.

Maybe we make some premium pay servers with baller architecture, killer response time, user capacity limits and high speed storage?

But the point is that without a business model, the Fediverse will only be able to handle a limited number of enthusiasts before it faces scaling problems.

Eventually, it's going to be ads, donations or payments. It's all someone else's computer, someone has to foot the bill. But at great scale, you should be able to have an ad-free experience for something in the range a dollar or two a month.