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Fediverse sustainability
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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The "financial aspect" is much smaller than you seem to think.
It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.
You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don't know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you're making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.
I don’t know yet there have been several instances that shut down do to finances. Tell me how does something shut down due to finances if it’s not costly for the person? The Fediverse is also much larger than Lemmy.
Look at the actual numbers.
In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649
People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it's not as expensive to run as you seem to think.
This is ONE instance. Search or make a post and ask how many instances have shut down due to finances. Outside of finances it’s burnout due to moderation.
I think "shut down due to finances" really means "it was too much work to organize this, collect donations and run a production website" or "my site was too niche to attract users and i didn't want to put the effort in".
There's enough instances with public finances, to show that it's a solvable problem.
Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?
Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?
Does it matter? What if I start 24 instances tomorrow and shut them all down by friday? Does that really have an impact on sustainability? Conversely them pointing to lemmy.world is a prime example of exactly how it is sustainable. As long as one instance remains running it is sustaining. Other instances may come and go and that's sad and all. But it's pretty affordable by most metrics
It does matter if people are on your instance, just say you don’t care about others. Several instances have shutdown without warning and people lost their accounts. It matters because people matters. We should also want good experiences. Stating that people will get over it and find a new instance and make new posting history is selfish af
Untold email servers have shut down and people have lost their accounts there. But email seems pretty sustainable still. So that doesn't seem like a good metric either.