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?

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[–] hoodlem@hoodlem.me 18 points 1 year ago (7 children)

This is a fantastic point. The more the financial burden falls on one person, the more likely it is that at some point the expense will become too great for that individual admin to carry.

So from a financial perspective it makes a lot of sense to have many small/medium sized instances rather than a few large ones.

You suggest when an instance reaches a given size, stop recommending it. Totally agree. Based on known expenses for instances, it might not be a bad idea to have a recommended threshold (number of users) at which to stop or slow signups as well.

There are several places that would need to be updated when it comes to recommending instances. One that comes to my mind right away is apps. Several apps only list the top 4-5 instances when signing up. And default to Lemmy.world. It’s not a great situation to be in, but I think we can make a change if this info gets circulated more broadly.

[–] Sean@liberal.city 2 points 1 year ago

@hoodlem @Blaze I started out on Masthead dot social as my Mastodoninstance & then it imploded without an explanation, now I'm on a really small instance administered by someone I followed when on Masthead. There should be someway to migrate your account even without your original instance being involved, like a PGP public-private key implementation, getting users to normalize floating from instance to instance without a hiccup would alleviate concerns about the glut of users on 4-5 instances

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