I’m really enjoying lemmy. I think we’ve got some growing pains in UI/UX and we’re missing some key features (like community migration and actual redundancy). But how are we going to collectively pay for this? I saw an (unverified) post that Reddit received 400M dollars from ads last year. Lemmy isn’t going to be free. Can someone with actual server experience chime in with some back of the napkin math on how expensive it would be if everyone migrated from Reddit?
I think that having few big instances is not failing, it is natural for social network (where lemmy is some representation of one) to be scale-free network, which has big hubs and buch of smaller nodes connected.
Most people would go to general instances, but artists will probably go to some art focused instabce, developer to proggraming.dev… But we will have bih hubs, there is no way around it.
Yes, you are right, I should have formulated that better.
I would expect that there would be a few big instances. What I should have said is having only a few big instances and no small instances would be a failure. It would be totally acceptable to have a few big instances and lots of smaller instances that can still interact with the fediverse. The failure would be if you have something like 20 very big instances that only interact with each other and that are inaccessible to the small instances - either because they close their federation, or because it is too resource-intensive for small instances to interact with them. In this case you end up with a centralized system again, not better and potentially worse than something like Reddit. As long as someone can spin-up their own instance if they want to and be part of the larger ecosystem, it would be a success.