this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
94 points (98.0% liked)

Fediverse

17561 readers
2 users here now

A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Pretty straight question.

I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.

I also know that Lemmy devs said that

lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503

As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (16 children)

This is a very short-sighted view. Once you set up things to depend on a regular project related income (donations or otherwise), the entire project lives or dies with it.

Even if donations right now are sufficient, sooner or later they will fall short and then the people running the service have no choice but to either close it down or try to find another source of income, such as advertisement or selling out to a company interested in the user data. The latter has already happened with such large Mastodon servers.

If you want to ensure that the Fediverse stays a healthy, non-corporate and humans-first environment, then being able to run (small) servers out of the admin's pocket is the only working solution. Of course it makes sense to try and find more than one admin and have all of them able and willing to cover expenses, but donations should always be just a "nice to have" on top of that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (13 children)

is the only working solution

that is total nonsense. these smaller instances do cost money as well. so either million people needs to collectively shell out money to run one big instance, or they have to collectively shell out money running million small instances. the latter will cost more money when you sum that up.

so, if you want the fediverse to stay healthy, people have to pay for it, one way or the other. your economic perpetum mobile does not really work how you think it does.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that is total nonsense

While reading this thread, your comments stood out to me as seeming inflammatory. Instead of making a statement like that, maybe make a good counter argument?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes I was surprised by the negativity too

load more comments (11 replies)
load more comments (13 replies)