this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Fediverse

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A community dedicated to fediverse news and discussion.

Fediverse is a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe".

Getting started on Fediverse;

founded 5 years ago
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I'm not looking forward to 5 years from now, where instances like this are the mastodon.social of federated reddit-likes. As much as they should block registrations, I don't think they will. ...but I have a hat on stand by, just in case I need to eat it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think they're stuck in a vicious circle, their server costs scale with size but new users are way more likely to donate. Users that have already donated feel like they've done their bit for a while, and that's if they're still around and engaged in a few weeks. Very few people want to donate monthly, subscription style.

My personal controversial view is people should put more faith in well-run self-hosted instances. It's a much more sustainable way to run a Fediverse server and self-hosted doesn't have to mean amateur hour. Just because an instance is cloud hosted doesn't mean it's well configured or secure either.

I have way more resources at my disposal than the vast majority of cloud hosted instances, for a tiny fraction of the cost. lemm.ee for example is very well run but has to put up with a 100kb image size limit because of cost-driven space constrains.

Self hosting is also closer to the spirit of what decentralization is supposed to mean - your server ultimately belongs to your host.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Interesting, I wasn't really thinking about this, I guess most of admins nowadays just prefer the convenience (including scalability) of a VPS.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I mean, with 27k monthly active users, they are more prevalent that Mastodon.social. The following instances are so much smaller it's almost comical.