Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I'm curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don't see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Cost of hosting an instance is highly variable based on the way it's hosted, the size of the instance, and what sort of instance it is (since there's many different kinds such as mastodon, peertube, Lemmy, etc)

Self hosting from home can cost just the price of hardware and power. Once you outsource hosting as many large instances do the price starts to rise. It's the large instances that start asking for donations as well, since it does cost more and more.

The fediverse vs. Big tech is the tortoise and the hare. It keeps slowly growing and as big tech takes a nap under a tree and pisses more people off by making more bad decisions. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about the concept -- email is federated and most boomers are just fine with email.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That's an interesting analogy!

It would appear that the overall nature of the Fediverse is to have numerous small instances that can communicate with each other, and since instance size is a factor in determining the cost of hosting, many people could host without seeing a huge chunk of their income being taken away for hosting.

Of course, I would imagine other factors that would determine whether someone should host or not, like having the technical competence necessary to troubleshoot server issues.