this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
31 points (80.4% liked)
Meta (lemm.ee)
3570 readers
6 users here now
lemm.ee Meta
This is a community for discussion about this particular Lemmy instance.
News and updates about lemm.ee will be posted here, so if that's something that interests you, make sure to subscribe!
Rules:
- Support requests belong in !support
- Only posts about topics directly related to lemm.ee are allowed
- If you don't have anything constructive to add, then do not post/comment here. Low effort memes, trolling, etc is not allowed.
- If you are from another instance, you may participate in discussions, but remain respectful. Realize that your comments will inevitably be associated with your instance by many lemm.ee users.
If you're a Discord user, you can also join our Discord server: https://discord.gg/XM9nZwUn9K
Discord is only a back-up channel, [email protected] will always be the main place for lemm.ee communications.
If you need help with anything, please post in !support instead.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Uhm... costs don't rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don't have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
More people, more resources. More people, more moderation. More people, more problems. More time consuming. More admins, more time to make decisions. And so on.
Yea but that's not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. That means the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
I mean in the initial growth phase. Yes it will eventually flatten out, but the way Lemmy is run atm won't likely do that unless it stays small.
Talking about exponential growth in the early phase makes even less sense, because exponential curves actually grow very slowly at the beginning while projects usually start out with substantial initial costs to get things going. And nothing about the way Lemmy is run indicates that it won't flatten out or doesn't flatten out already, I really have no idea why you would think that.
Maybe “snowballs” is a better metaphor. Point is, the way an instance is run today (1 person, maybe a small team dealing with everything) isn’t sustainable through growth without outside money coming in. The counter I keep hearing is to essentially keep that instance small, but number of users isn’t the only problem. More content needing to be processed is. And keeping things small and or having performance problems is not something that will help community building.