redditrefugee here
So, Lemmy.world is just one instance of lemmy… it maybe the biggest one, but its just one right? And it agrees to federate with other lemmy instances (like lemmy.ml)… got it. But at the end of the day, each instance is running on someones computer right? Whats the traffic like between these two? If I ran an instance, and federated with this site, what would that cost me? How much traffic does this instance produce?
Are we suppose to divide into our own instances to reduce costs, and then link them together through lemmy.world? wouldn’t that make it centralized? And then who is paying for THIS? How much is being a central hub between instances going to cost?
Sooner or later, we have to realize that these wonderful free things are usually a bubble that eventually pops when they have to start running ads.
Who is paying for this?
Well, there are schisms happening already. My local city not only has a community here on lemmy.world, but also one on the instance hosted in my city. Communities will be split and people won’t find each other.
It’s definitely a problem. It can be partially mitigated by searching for the specific identical community you are looking for on a different instance, and subscribing to it from the instance you are using, but that is certainly not a sustainable long term plan. It would rely on everyone always subscribing to every other identical community on every notable instance that comes up, to reach the same level of users as it would on one centralized platform. And that’s just a cost of decentralization.