Correct me if I’m wrong. I read ActivityPub standards and dug a little into lemmy sources to understand how federation works. And I’m a bit disappointed. Every server just has a cache and the ability to fetch something from another known server. So if you start your own instance, there is no profit for the whole network until you have a significant piece of auditory (e.g. private instances or servers with no users). Are there any “balancers” to utilize these empty instances? Should we promote (or create in the first place) a way how to passively help lemmy with such fast growth?
The thing you’re overlooking is that for a lot of the people hosting small instances, this is a hobby.
Speaking for myself, the cost of a domain is basically nothing, and adding Lemmy to my hosting setup was zero - I already have more ram, cpu, and disk space than I’d ever need for this instance.
Financial incentives are not the only thing people care about, and until relatively recently weren’t the general default purpose of online social spaces.
Ok, sure. But what if your instance became popular and started costing you hundreds per month? Or in a couple years and you lose interest, do you keep paying for it? What happens to all of the content that users created on your instance?
Well, I’m very explicitly not running it with the intent of it getting larger than maybe a couple dozen people I know who are interested. I’m not really interested in content moderation at any scale, let alone with random people I don’t know from the internet. (My most recent job was dealing with content & abuse for a large cloud provider, and I have zero interest in picking up shitpost babysitting if it’s avoidable.)
I’m otherwise going with the Mastodon Server Covenant as the basic guidelines: I’ve got a trusted friend I’m going to add as a 2nd admin, doing backups nightly, and at least a 90 day notice if/when I decide to stop hosting this.
I’d happily transfer the domain & data to anyone who wants to continue to admin it, or ask the community members what they want done.
I’ll admit that makes WAY less sense if I wanted to run an instance with thousands of users, but that’s very much not the goal.