I'm sorry. Does actually having to put a bit of skin in the game offend you? You'd rather the people spending the actual money and doing the actual work just bow to your whims?
Compassionate fucking BUDDHA are the anti-defederation crowd a bunch of entitled, whiny asses!
People often don't care to understand how much work it is to run a Lemmy instance. And the cost. I have my own website and the knowledge/money to start an instance, but I'm certainly not going to actually do that and monopolize the rest of my free time.
Its actually not that much work or money. I’m pretty bad when it comes to servers but i run my instance with about 50 users and pay $15 a month because i went with a more expensive host. A single user instance could spend less than $8 a month and setup isn’t hard
I thought the entire point of federated networks is that they give power to users, not to random rich people. If you want someone with a lot of money to decide what content you can see, you can go back to Twitter and Reddit.
Ah, so it’s exactly like commercial networks then, where the true users are not those who create content, but those who want to police what other people can talk about.
All this is telling us is that you have no idea how much it costs or what it takes to run a server, or what a server is.
A server is just a computer that serves traffic from other computers. The rpi running pihole on my network is a server. My gaming desktop that doubles as a plex server sometimes is a server. The pfSense router managing my network is a server. The proxmox node that I have running a bunch of home utility and automation services is… you guessed it: a server.
You can find computers that are being essentially given away if you look for them online. Big companies clean out inventory all the time, and snagging old systems is not only cheap, but also helps to mitigate e-waste. It can be as cheap or as expensive as you need it to be, based on your budget and intended uses.
The big difference is that with federated stuff like Lemmy you can own the actual content you create. By running your own instance, of course. Become a user. Own the data.
And users don't even necessarily need to set up their own instance. There will be defed-heavy and defed-light instances users can just choose from based on personal preference. The instance mostly just matters for who federates and internal moderation policy (which is aligned), so it's not like anyone will be forced one way or another.