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.
That’s true. (But I think 100k servers with 1000 users will be more expensive than 1 server with 100M users. But we don’t want to become the new R*ddit)
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?