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Fediverse sustainability
(lemmy.ml)
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See my other comment examining where the top 10 instances by userbase get their funding from and how well they're doing
Not to mention that over the years there have been a lot of instances that have gotten into a variety of precarious situations that could have been avoided or alleviated if they had a lot more money.
Their problem is that they allowed themselves to become too big and unsustainable in the long run.
It's not just their problem. Even if every instance carefully load-balanced users with each other so that all instance were the same size and nobody was too big, there would still be a problem securing funding as the fediverse as a whole gets bigger.
Donations alone on the biggest instances aren't enough to keep the lights on, spreading out those users across other instances won't make more money suddenly materialize, in fact it might make money disappear faster, as smaller instances have a higher cost-per-user due to insufficient economies of scale.
If the instance becomes so big, that it depends on donations, then it is too big.
Exactly, I'm surprised how little I've seen this pointed out in this thread. There's essentially zero reason for instances to grow beyond basic sustainability.
@petunia @Spzi Some are not about money: mastodon.lol is purely a personal decision; switter.at is not gonna lobby against governments that want to censor queer voices (which is what "online safety regulations" are really about). For Pawoo, Pixiv certainly had the money to keep it running, so this might be profitability concerns (given that at that time Pixiv also phased out other less-popular services to focus on its main platforms); CrossGate/Russell could be financial and liability concerns.