hi all!

so, I guess all the instances and the development itself are in need of some money to be run.

do all the instances need to survive on their own?

I’m not sure how it works in the background, but instances with a small community would still need to be able to mirror all the threads from other instances - if its community requests it
did I get this wrong?

I’m currently supporting the development through Patreon, but I guess sometime in the future l, it would be wise to split this with server costs for the instances.

or do I miss something?

thanks!

  • naeapOP
    1·
    1 year ago

    three idea was more, how the single instances can finance themselves. network traffic and storage need to be paid somehow.

    I’m not sure how the federated system works exactly and how much a small instance would need to mirror or pipe through, when the users subscribe to large communities on another instance.

    so I was wondering, how instances with a small user base can keep up financially - bigger ones can probably live of donations. If a small instance doesn’t need much space or traffic, because subscriptions on remote instances are directly handled on the remote instance, than this is probably no problem.

    I’m thinking of setting up my own small server and am not sure what exactly to expect…

    • mrmanager@lemmy.today
      2·
      1 year ago

      For me, I wanted an instance that is my own. So I set it up and I pay maybe 10 dollars per month for it. It’s not going to break my bank even if lots of users decide to join it. :)

      • naeapOP
        1·
        1 year ago

        thanks for the input!

        I just haven’t figured out, what happens if users on my small instance would join larger communities in other instances. does the small instance needs to mirror or route the traffic to the other instance, or is this only done through links and on the small instance is really only the stuff local users generated?

        • mrmanager@lemmy.today
          1·
          1 year ago

          You join a small instance and go look into Communities. From there you can search communities on any other instance if you know the link to the community. And you see that if you go to the instance and just look at the community. That link can be pasted into search on your own instance, or some other instance you are using (like mine, or anyones) and you will be able to subscribe to content from it.

          So it really doesnt matter which instance you are using… :)

          So on lemmy.ml you have a community called Ask Lemmy. Go into that one, find the link (https://lemmy.ml/c/asklemmy) and paste it into search on any other instance where you are a user.

          You should get a link, and you can click on it to subscribe. I think its amazing because it means all the instances are just like email servers really, and they can all talk to eachother.

          • naeapOP
            1·
            1 year ago

            thanks, but sorry, that wasn’t the question.
            I’m perfectly aware of the user end principle, but I’m not so sure about the technical backend.

            where is the data of remote instances stored?
            if this is synced to the local instance, than small servers would need to mirror remote content.

            but I guess, I’ll check the ActivityPub and Lemmy Doc/Code