How can the fediverse scale and grow to large communities like Reddit without large infrastructure and servers? How can a non-profit driven platform afford to keep the lights on if this takes off?
Many hands make light work or something like that. :)
Continuing to decentralize will play a big part. Also we as users will have to have greater ownership and contribution. Not always monetarily, but in participation, moderation or otherwise.
Decentralization and time. The technology will continue to grow. Not too long ago, platforms on the scale of Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc. were thought to be impossible. As adoption increases, so too will the contributions from the open source community.
I mean I could be completely wrong but I think that’s where federation actually comes out on top. Look at Reddit, apparently still not even profitable. However if someone on Lemmy owns an instance and infrastructure costs get too high they can stop new communities and users from joining until they get more money through donations or whatever ways people come up with sourcing income.
Again though, this could all be completely wrong and misled but that’s what I think at least.
I didn't necessarily think about some of the overhead that your comment brought up when I made mine. I like your idea about opting out of some features on certain instances and I think that makes sense for quite a few users/communities/instance hosters.
Eventually the "fediverse" may end up even more loosely connected than it is. All that it really needs to be is decentralised/federated and open source/open protocol.
We're in the age of epic centralisation of the Internet, but it wasn't always that way. Hopefully we go back to something where there is much more diversity, much less corporate control, and much less need for monolithic platforms that need to support millions of users (and the technical challenges that come with that).
As far as money, I think people are much more likely to pay for things online if they feel like they have some kind of genuine control over them. i.e. it's a "donation" not paying for a service. Servers are pretty cheap these days, so even a big instance can get by on a few thousand a year.
Some instances are able to generate donations to cover costs.
The mastodon instance I use (sfba.social) currently has enough donations to last 8 months. I donate $3 per month.
The Lemmy instance I use (lemmy. world) already has a Mastodon instance with enough donations to cover both. Once they separate funds I will donate to them as well.
TL;DR - Satisfied users donate towards costs.
I wonder if it might be a good idea to let people link their Lemmy account with whatever platform they're donating through, so they get a little badge on their posts and comments showing that they're a contributor.
the instance that i'm typing from is being hosted in someone's cupboard with some pretty off-the-shelf parts. i'v probably got enough parts for something similar laying around my house. if instances stay to low populations and the workload is distributed amongst all of them, it's not actually stressing the system all that much at all.
that being said, as soon as the aussie zone sysadmin asks for financial assistance, i'll be putting my hand into my pocket. again, if enough people do that then it's not much of a cost at all
The honest answer is simply by distributing the costs and rewarding efficiency. As it stands Lemmy is already one of the most efficient per user options on the fediverse. Certainly far better than reddit.
Wikipedia is non profit NGO and they cover the running costs with donations.
The thing to keep in mind if you are on a Fediverse instance right now is that you are a very early adopter.
We're still in the stage where we need people acting like bees. Go out to the greater web and find web sites (REAL WEBSITES, NOT AGGREGATORS), and bring back their content. Stuff that has some actual meaning and teeth that can enable people to make comments.
If you're a commenter, you need to get in there and engage with people. Not every comment needs to be a top level comment. If you see someone has said something, and you've got a response to it, even just a conversational one. Post it.
And finally, memes and images are cheap content. They can be looked at and consumed quickly which makes them great for lurkers, but awful for community building. You need actual content for that.
This is the hive, everyone here are drones, if you want the site to thrive, you need to bring back high quality feed material and you need to communicate with your fellow drones, not just hope that other people will communicate with you.
Many hands make light work or something like that. :)
Continuing to decentralize will play a big part. Also we as users will have to have greater ownership and contribution. Not always monetarily, but in participation, moderation or otherwise.
The fediverse directly helps with that exact problem by allowing actual instances to remain small as needed. There’s no requirement that an instance have millions of users, which is what drives up cost. Personal instances can still participate in all other federated instances’ communities.
Mastodon has been a good Guinea pig for proof positive the model can work, with something like 4 million+ active users.
It's a bit like email as I understand it - just different format and more people involved. You can get email thru an app, a website, and multiple different servers run email servers.
An older name for 'the fediverse' is 'the world wide web', and an older name for that is 'arpanet.' It's a pretty recent development that a few large companies control access to information.