this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2023
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I think you bring up a pretty important point about federation in that it allows for and even encourages expansion in some ways, so that's a good way to keep optimistic about it. I guess I just feel a little embarrassed. Especially when you look at posts like the recent one asking Lemmy users how they feel about the reddit refugees, and it's flooded with responses from Reddit refugees instead offering unsolicited feedback about design choices. Then you have threads like this with people laying claim to the fediverse more or less. It just feels like some kind of a Christopher Columbus situation. While I realize that might be a little tone-deaf it's the best analogy I have for it.
Any community is a sum of it's members, good bad, or otherwise. I think there will be a wave of us Reddit refugees, but also word is going to spread to other places like Meta and hopefully bring in even more people. 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. Sorry if we're stumbling all over your garden in the meantime.
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.
Hmm. Theoretically you could commercialise an instance, I guess.
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.
or make a non-profit. archiveofourown have ~20% of reddit's traffic and run purely on donation.
That might work too, but I feel like it could be tricky to fundraise if there's 1000 equivalent large-ish instances.
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.
I definitely get the sentiment. Everyone is looking for how to make this what they "need" (want) without enough consideration for what it already is and who got it there. It's going to be a journey, that's for sure.