It’s been a long journey, but here we arrive. Welcome home.

  • vinniep@beehaw.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Getting people sorted into servers that are going to be able to handle the load, or even better getting them to host their own servers is going to be the way to go.

    That part still worries me a smidge, and it’s somewhat related to my other concern about funding/scaling. As more of the general public discover and move over, the % of the general population willing and able to host their own instance is going to steadily decrease. Not saying that we’re all gonna die or anything, but it’s going to be a shift and we’ll have to continue to adapt.

      • vinniep@beehaw.org
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        4
        ·
        1 year ago

        I expect that in time, that’s exactly what will happen. Some instance somewhere will offer guaranteed availability and performance for a monthly fee to it’s members. That feels icky at first blush, but why should it? It’s not everyone’s cup of tea, but no one is forced to use that instance to be part of the larger community, and one instance can’t hold the community hostage like a single company social media company could. They’ll have success right up until they don’t and the Fediverse will sort it out through migrations of users and communities.

      • oyenyaaow@lemmy.zip
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit’s traffic and run purely on donation.

        • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there’s 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.

          • vinniep@beehaw.org
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 year ago

            You’d have to have a hook - guaranteed performance or uptime. Maybe some niche feature set or enhancement.

            I think it’s similar to some of the other open source vendors out there that sell a service that they host, but do not actually own (even if they are one of the open source project contributors). You can’t get too greedy because the thing you sell can be sold by anyone, so you have to compete on price and “extras”. Not the easiest way to make money, but it’s not unheard of.