I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.

  • Sjatar@sjatar.net
    2·
    1 year ago

    I’m posting from a self hosted server running on a raspberry pi! While no long term test has been carried out yet, it’s really snappy :3

    I wonder how the network will scale if more and more would self-hosts small instances with just 2-4 users. If it would decrease load or increase load on the instances that hold popular communities.

    • jcg@halubilo.social
      2·
      1 year ago

      I’m pretty sure it’s a net increase in load, saying this from my own small instance here. I don’t want to primarily use the big instances - that’s why I started my own. But lemmy.world encompasses so much that any load I would’ve prevented by subscribing to communities outside of lemmy.world is probably negated by lemmy.world already being subscribed to that community. And even if we’re just counting lemmy.world content, pretty sure it’s a net increase because browsing lemmy.world just shows aggregate votes and paginated lists. When federating they’re sending everything, even the 90% of stuff I and my users never even see. I wonder what the tipping point is, where the load of federating communities is outweighed by the load saved by not constantly reloading lists and whatnot. I bet it’s at least 10.

      EDIT: Also wanted to add there’s proposals for how to spread out the load without having to switch protocols or anything. I certainly wouldn’t mind my own instance being used to forward stuff on.