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Fediverse sustainability
(lemmy.ml)
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly out of my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.
I think the real problem is not financial, but technical problems. For example, when a post is shared in an instance, that instance sends that activity to approximately 1000 other active instances. As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around :) I'm not sure how it will scale in the future.
In addition, since each instance keeps all the data in its own database, the database size of the instance with 1m users and the instance with 1k users is the same. In my opinion, this is what is really unsustainable.
Hehe, I wonder if some technology like Tor could help here, distributing the work across many servers instead of each one having to do all the work entirely by itself? One day, if someone wants to build it, that may come, but it will not be me, nor today it seems:-P.