Pretty straight question.
I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.
I also know that Lemmy devs said that
lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503
As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?
Yes, both costs money, but only one has a clear pathway for sustainability and one admin paying out of their pocket for a small instance of less than 1000 or so members is easily possible.
And since most admins will rent a VPS in one of the larger cloud services like Hetzner, the economies of scale are the same or better than having a large instance needing dedicated hardware somewhere.
Edit: and no. depending on a cloud host is not the same as directly running the instances by a corporation. Those cloud hosts are more like your ISP, i.e. infrastructure providers.
Edit2: Also… one huge factor is labour costs of the admin. A small instance can be a hobby side project that only needs a few hours per month. A large instance is not and people will seriously start questioning why they are not being paid a proper salary for running a large instance sooner or later.
yeah, no.
again, your “lot of small instances” scenario is more expensive than few big ones, because there is a lot of unneccesary overhead.
that is not to say that there should be only big instances, but you really seem to think you have invented some perpetuum mobile, and let me assure you - you did not.
if you have enough admins willing to run small instances and finance them out of their own pockets, these same people can just contribute money to some bigger instance instead.
and vice versa - if you’d end up in scenario where you don’t have enough people to finance the big instance, why do you think these same people would be suddenly willing to finance the small ones AND add some admin work on top of the money? (which they may be lacking both time and skill to do)
also this is totally academic discussion, you are just drafting catastrophic scenario for which you have no basis in reality. just look at the wiki and you will see that people will pay for thing they consider useful.
You are the one that is far removed from reality and just talks as if this was some theoretical economic discussion with “rational actors optimizing for surplus value” 😅
I am an instance admin of one of the oldest Lemmy instances and have been doing stuff like this for nearly 20 years now. I am not talking theoretically, but based on real examples that I have seen personally happening.
I didn’t know you were admin on slrkpnk.net, thank you for your work!
cool. and how many people who weren’t willing to contribute few bucks, but were willing and able to start and maintain their own instance, have you seen? 🤣
Very many. It’s a fun hobby and I know a lot of people that would rather contribute in hours and hardware they already have (or rent anyways for other purposes) than forking over hard earned cash.
people who already own their own server are not at all representative sample of general population.
so i am not going to say you are straight up lying, but you are definitely obfuscating a lot ;)
The point is that this doesn’t have to be a “representative sample of general population”. It is sufficient if one in a thousand users or so is willing and able to host a small instance, which is pretty much a given.
no, it is not given, it is number you just pulled out of your ass. that may be true for people who joined some solar punk or open source instance, but it is absolutely not true for general population. there wouldn’t be 126k people on lemmy world if that were true.
The number is based on how many people are needed, not how many there are with such a skillset.
It is hilarious that you assume that there are not one in a thousand with such a skillset as spinning up a a small fediverse instance on a cloud host takes literally one afternoon and anyone that knows how to use a computer can learn the needed skills in less than a week.
But I can easily proof that there are enough people willing and able to do this, as right now there are more than enough small Lemmy instances online to take over all of the Lemmy.world users if each of them had about 1000 members. You can easily look it up yourself.
The problem is uninformed users like you that flock to the largest instances and thus actively repeat the same mistake they already did on Reddit.