I was on beehaw until they defederated, just seemed like the wrong answer to me and one that will just end up being damaging to Lemmy, especially the way they went about it.

but their goals are not realistic if they want to be a platform of any significant size.

As I understand it, they don't care about being big, they care about having a community of people that align to their principles.

Problem is, if you don't pay too much attention to their server description, you might not realize what their principles are.

I think they got so big because many people were just trying to join any instance under the massive influx, without thinking much about it, and beehaw became much bigger than they intended to be (or expected).

Now that they have defederated from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, people "not intended" to be there are leaving, that should bring them "more down" than they currently are, I think that's what they actually want.

also because it seems sustainable with the donations and Ruud is a gigachad

Kbin.social user chiming in here! I haven't checked out Lemmy but I'm content with what kbin offers me so far.

Thing is, as long as it's not possible to merge similar communities from different instances, large instances are actually preferable from a User uxperience point of view.

It’s gotta start somewhere though. It makes sense that as refugees flock over they’ll gravitate towards the largest instance, because the expectation is that’s where the usage is and they don’t yet grok how the Fediverse works. As they settle in, I’d expect a number of them to spread out a bit. Once we can migrate accounts I’d expect the load to be distributed even better.

Rather, more instances, not servers. An instance can scale out using as many servers as the owner can tolerate.

I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one managing a horizontally scaled fediverse instance on a cloud platform though, that shit adds up fast, and no way in hell is anyone going to donate here.

I honestly don’t get how that’s supposed to work indefinitely, that’s usually where ad money comes in and… god dammit we’re back to square one lol. I’m here for a good time, not a long time 😎

That's total users tho, I think OP is referring to lemmy.world users only.

I think that will be a lot more feasible if the capability to migrate user accounts between instances is added.

Right now for a new user joining the fediverse, the largest instances are the best option since they are the most likely to remain up and federated with most other instances. Why would you join some random smaller instance when there’s a clearly established one already there?

Making it possible to change instances would remove some of this friction - then your choice of initial instance isn’t important.

We are all in this together.