this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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I would add that the risk of joining a small server is that the owner can suddenly delete them at any time and you would have to start all over again elsewhere. Best thing to do is to make an account on the large instances only.
Lemmy.world has only existed for a month. Why the confidence that it’s here to stay?
It's run through the Open Collective, and is also run by Ruud who runs one of the larger Mastodon instances as well as some other stuff on the Fediverse I believe. They're a fairly trusted actor in the space and I think pretty transparent with everything they do which is probably another reason many people flocked there.
Open Collective is a funding platform unaffiliated with l.w
You're absolutely right, I had completely misunderstood its involvement for some reason. Still, Ruud's experience in the Fediverse running mastodon.world gives me reason to believe lemmy.world will be reliable too.
I'm a little confused by your comment. What function does Open Collective serve other than simply as a fiscal host?
A reliable pipeline for donations, transparency and experience running large Fediverse servers (EDIT: list of Fediverse servers run by Ruud). You're right that they're not directly involved in running the server, I had misunderstood that and thought they were directly associated for some reason.
There is a very large range between tiny instance that can disappear overnight and "large instance". The large instances are actually more likely to disappear as their hosting costs are beyond what a small group of admins can pay out of their own pocket easily, so they vitally depend on donations and that can break down easily for many reasons.
I disagree. The large Mastodon instances have managed to survive for a while on donations. I haven't seen a large Mastodon instance go kaput (though you can correct me if I'm wrong).
There were certainly some that had to close registrations as their donation base was insufficient for the number of users trying to sign up. And others were sold to very questionable companies as they couldn't finance themselves otherwise.
But that wasn't my argument. We are talking about things that can go wrong with instances. Just because you didn't see any large instances go down in this "nice weather" period, doesn't mean they are resilient to serious shocks.
A small to medium sized instance that is basically run as a hobby by a few admins and is optimized for being cheap enough to not need donations is the much more sustainable and resilient instance.
Yeah but then you run into the risk of federation/defederation politics. We've already have had a major instance defederate.
That is why you would want to choose an instance that aligns with your values, so that if they defederate, it is to your benefit.
How is this related to instance size? There are large instances which defederate (I think most do), and small instances which do not.
If anything, I'd see it as an argument for joining small ones. There, your voice can have a bigger impact on federation decisions.
Mostly I think if you care about federation status, be sure to join an instance with a federation policy which you like.
Mine has existed for a few years now, so I'm fairly confident it'll exist for more