this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Technology
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Community is enough. The Fediverse allows for small servers that do not cost a lot to run.
Due to the lack of economies of scale, they cost more per user than centralized alternative. Either we will have thousands of people who don't mind footing the bill of the free riders, or we all will have to pay our share.
It's true, thousands of cheap instances will add up, and probably to something bigger than what a server farm would have. Unless we start hosting something heavier than text extensively I expect the bill per user is still going to be tiny, though.
I think it's definitely the first one. Very unlikely things have any reason to shift to an all paid model. Even still the cost of a single user is almost negligible. The cost to support thousands of those "free riders" is still probably on the order of dollars.
Probably at first, yes. But I'd guess that after the novelty wears off, the percentage of people willing to pay $5-$10 per month for a service that can be had for $10/year (just to compare with my basic Mastodon service on Communick is going to go down. They will either start looking for an alternative where their money is covering someone they know (something that I also tried to cover with "group packages") or they will upgrade to run their own instance so they have more control over their fediverse presence.