Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they’re going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?
No single instance should get to the size of 100 million users if we are doing federation correctly.
So if the ideal Lemmy structure is a large number of medium sized instances, would you say there should be a mechanism (either at the API level or handled by clients) to randomly select a general purpose instance at sign up?
We should never have ads.
We should simplify the process for lemmy servers to display how much the servers are costing monthly, how much funds are coming in monthly, and the way for people to donate monthly.
So don’t run large instances. Either selfhost at home if you’re on symmetric fiber or use cheap ARM cloud instances.
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Its fine if “most” people don’t want to selfhost. In a small instance only 0.1% of the people using it need to do it.
It’s good that this discussion keeps coming up; federated instances are not meant to get so large. Once communities become too large they lose cohesion and culture, invariably they eventually sacrifice users’ well-being for practical purposes like funding, and at that point they become no better than the platforms they replaced. The cycle of exploitation continues.
There are communities online that have preserved their community culture and have not resorted to unethical practices to maintain themselves for more than 20 years, they are always smaller more intentional communities that value quality interactions over quantity of users. Given all the evidence showing how mentally and socially harmful large centralized platforms are - should we really aspire to recreate those unhealthy spaces in the fediverse?
The fediverse is an opportunity to take things a different direction, a direction in which smaller more cohesive communities share with each other without any one community dominating and suffocating the others. Federation is a fundamentally different model that challenges the centralizing paradigm “growth is good”.
i overall agree.
one point i struggle agreeing / see what you mean is small instances mean small communities.
I’m on lemmy.ml, but i use lemmy as federated, i don’t see the lemmy.ml community when on lemmy, but the fediverse.
in a way I don’t care on what instance i am.
i come from a distributed systems background and to ne this is normal.
is that anti fediverse?
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Nope. Donations are enough.
Especially cost/donation ratio should get lower on large scale.
Limit instances to 2000 users. Rely on donations. Once the software will be mature enough, we will know exactly how much it costs per users. Users can even pay for others (I wouldn’t mind cover the costs for users I would know who could not afford it).
Ads require tracking to be valuable
You are not supposed to have large instances. This is a self inflicted problem. The entire point of federated is to have many small instances and share the load.
Lemmy.world decided to accept more than 100k users. Ok fine, but the rest of the instances don’t have this problem whatsoever. We actually want more users on our instances.
And I knew this would happen. I was watching it grow and I knew eventually it would be a question about how to finance it, and I knew users would talk as if it’s a problem for Lemmy itself. It’s not, it’s a problem for Lemmy.world.
I mean sure, if it’s possible to only have ads for Lemmy.world users… Then go ahead and watch your ads. But I don’t think the rest of the instances want that experience.
