Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
I think a good business model is similar to your idea, but with a twist:
Unless accounts become portable across instances, I could see best practices shifting towards users having their own personal instance so that they control it and thus can’t lose access to their history etc. But since ain’t nobody got time for that, I imagine the business model being companies providing turnkey personal instances and getting paid for hosting and management.
Oh, I definitely see a future where e-mail providers provide fediverse access as part of their service - gmail or iCloud or whatever. There will still be demand for pseudonymous ids, but there’s a place for real ids as well.
Being a shared service, Gmail is not what I mean (unless you’re talking about Google Workspace, I guess). I’m talking about providing Lemmy hosting for custom domains so each user gets their own instance. Think
@cerevant@cerevant.tldinstead of@cerevant@lemmy.world: The paid service does the actual hosting and admin tasks, but the user/owner controls the policy (that only applies to himself) and thus can’t get booted off, only defederated.…Hmm, the more I write about this the more it sounds susceptible to the same problem that self-hosted email has (the spammers ruined it, so all the big services preemptively block mail coming from less-than-well-known domains and don’t even give them a chance to prove their legitimacy). I kinda feel like it might only work if personal instances became the norm, and wouldn’t be tenable if small instances and big instances had to coexist. I guess it just goes to show how many unknowns there are about how the Fediverse will mature and scale.