Another good point he made is about how he's calculating this. He's projecting current usage into the sub model.
But he's probably very right that casuals will probably leave and power users will probably pay. So it's the Spotify problem, your power users use you more costing you more but they don't pay more so you start going in the red. Considering relay is not a VC backed app or anything like that. One miscalculation and one bad month and you could see thousands of dollars in surprise costs.
I just had a Rollercoaster of emotions. I was sad and angry to see relay go be sure it's been with me for idk how long (more than 10 years? Has it been that long?). But then losing relay would severely cut my reddit time and lemmy being a lot smaller meant that I could potentially kick this habit. So was kind of excited.
Then I read your message that relay is not going and I'm like "fuck! My addiction will never be cured!" Then saw its a subscription model and now I'm really conflicted.
That's my situation as well. Out of curiosity I went into reddit today to see how different it would look. It's close to the same. A lot of the subs I go to are in the "Yeah it sucks but we're small so we won't make a dent so fuck it.." other subs like /r/games with their BS excuse of "we support it but don't want to do anything about it". Overall, kind of the same. Kind of makes me sad
Yeah it's there "This house is full, please go to another one.." but unless you know what's up. That could be a huge deterrent to new users which I don't think it's the goal. I now know how this fediverse thing works and that it doesn't really matter which instance I'm using. But for a lot of new users that concept doesn't even register. So it needs to be more transparent from a UX perspective. Sure we could leave it as a sort of "gatekeep" and from a certain point of view it makes sense. It all depends on what the lemmy devs what to achieve.
I would go one step further that the instance thing should be transparent. Like when you sign up, some process could determine from a "neutral instances pool" which is the one you should join, then when you log in you're in that instance but you don't really know where you are. It just "works". That probably requires a lot of rework and sharing login infomration between instances. But as a more "aspirational thing"
This is something that lemmy devs need to better address. This is an "Eternal September" kind of situation. People (me included) are not used to the fediverse. They think you can participate only if you're in that instance. And people want content, so they think "why's the instance with most people? Ahh lemmy.ml? Cool, let's join.
Go to the bottom of the page, click on the Instances link and you'll se 2 lists, all federated instances and all defederated instances.