By having more instances and better user distribution. Running a small-ish instance isn't very expensive, around 5-10 euro a month (some VPS providers are cheaper, etc). As Lemmy development continues, and more optimizations come in, these smaller lemmy instances will be able to support more users.

There is also a discussion on GitHub to introduce user and community migrations between instances. So once that feature is implemented, it will be easier to redistribute everything across all Lemmy instances.

Most instances will hit a hard cap where the user support can't scale anymore. Admins will have to close sign-ups and force new users to other instances to distribute the load. That's the point of federation.

The issue is admins do not yet know where the limits are, and Lemmy still needs a lot more backend optimization work.

Why? A single Linux server has been able to support tens of thousands of simultaneous clients for many years now.

That sort of thing should be a self-correcting problem to an extent - when performance drops, people will (hopefully) move to other intances. Also, a well-managed instance would stop accepting new members before it go to that point.

I think we’ll see a variety of servers with different funding models, similar to how radio and tv stations in the us can have a variety of funding models. NPR has a network of member stations that all carry their content (if the stations want, or they can get content from another station, or they can make it themselves).

Threads is an example of a federated service with a corporate funding model. I definitely think it’ll survive since they have as much money as Facebook wants to sink into it.

But we’ll probably also see servers that run on donations by a dedicated community.

If Threads is the NBC/CBS/ABC of the federated landscape, then those small servers will be like public radio stations, which operate on donations and the occasional government grant.

I think there are people who would chip in a little bit to fund a non-commercial server just the same as there are people who chip in money to NPR.

As opposed to a corperate social media site, Lemmy has waaaay lower operating costs (not servers). It’s open source so dev work is volunteer, and there isn’t a bunch of resources dedicated to squeezing users for every penny or appeasing advertisers.

Servers can get pricey for sure, but not having all of that other overhead goes a ways to making it more sustainable.

So I was wondering is it helpfull if i run my own instance than for me and my roommates ? Or ?

Worse come to worse I'm here for a good time not a long time.

Like if an instance like lemmy.world gets too big and fails I'll probably head to another instance like kbin.social. If it starts a failure cascade people will leave for traditional social media or just leave social media entirely until federation can support it.

Maybe I end up leaving for another social media site, or I just watch youtube and no real social media or something. Whatever happens I'm here while I'm here.

I mean, define "too big".

Lemmy.world and mastodon.world are funded from mastodon.world's OpenCollective account: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld

They seem to be doing alright atm, though who knows how much of that is a byproduct of recent immigration.

I run a lemmy server and its actually very hard to encourage people to sign up and use the server as they have to resubscribe to their communities manually or with a script and people just dont want to do it for basically very little gain for themselves individually even if when hundreds of people do it collectively it helps reduce load on popular servers. Its kind of like the climate change issue. One person doing it on their own doesnt change much and incurs a lot of work so why bother? Even if it is true that 1000 people moving would make a measurable difference.

Https://lemmy.myserv.one if you do want to join, however.

The better question is, how will lemmy survive if instances get too big. The whole point of the fediverse is to prevent centralization.

IMO we need self-imposed regulations that are community enforced. In the context of user count, the community should decide on an appropriate max active user count. Each instance should deactivate signups if they're over the limit, and if they refuse, other instances should defederate them until they do. In general I'm not a fan of defederation, but I also don't think we should defederate threads just because it's owned by Meta. It should be defederated because it's behavior is anti-fediverse.

I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.

Is that really so though? Assuming some small percentage of the user base chooses to donate, would that not scale as the instance gets larger, as long as the percentage stays about the same?

I decided to toss something like a buck a month at my instance as I came with the reddit migration and didn't want to be a part of the problem. I also appreciate the ad-free space we have here on lemmy.

And it's not like running a PBS station or something in terms of costs. I'm actually pretty optimistic about the donation model, though maybe you're right? Maybe the optimism is misplaced?

Scaling is a big concern with Lemmy, and pretty much any Fediverse platform. However the positive side is the software can adapt and as it becomes more popular it will naturally acquire more resources.

Admins do have control over the size of their instance. They can shut down new sign-ups if they get to a point where they can't support any more users. They can either expand their capacity or leave sign-ups closed. Ideally as you get more users you get more support through donations which can cover the cost of expansion.

Another aspect is how well ActivityPub can hold up to demand as more and more instances enter the fold (ActivityPub is the protocol standard that supports the Fediverse). Hopefully the designers have put a lot of thought into scalability. ActivityPub has mechanisms to limit instance resources to what's on demand from users of that instance. It's not like each instance has to accommodate the whole of data and bandwidth comprised by the platform.

As users we'll just have to see how it holds up and have some faith the designers did a good job with scalability. I think the other aspect of having enough instances to support the size of the user base will work itself out naturally.

I’ve been wondering about this not so much from a performance perspective, but rather from a storage perspective. Assuming old posts and comments are never cleaned up, a handful of particularly active instances could easily crush federated smaller instances storage, right?

having a job on the side will help instance owners a lot

A large instance only needs a fraction of users to donate to be viable mastodon.social has like 100k users and they run on donations