this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2023
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The utility of twitter, facebook and reddit is their ubiquity. They each, in their own way, became the place you go to find [thing], and federated services will never have that. Discovering mastodon users who aren't already followed on your instance is hard. Discovering lemmy communities that aren't already followed on your instance is slightly easier. They're never going to show up in Local if they're not local, and they're never going to show up in All if no local subscribes. Decentralization, even with federation, works against virality, and if there's not a steady flow of content, then few people bother to sign up.
The instances get exponentially more useful as they get larger, but the costs of operation also get exponentially larger. If lemmy catches on, instances will absolutely grow beyond donations.
I think while Mastodon and Lemmy don't solve those issues particularly well at the moment I'm still confident they are solvable problems.
As for costs, I don't think it'll be that bad. It's not nearly as expensive if you're just trying to cover expenses (and not focused entirely on growth and revenue), and if a server does get to a point where the admins are concerned about donations keeping up they can cut off sign ups. Push incoming users to other instances that can handle the extra load (or spin up new ones if no more remain). It won't be the cleanest process and the inconvenience will make it tough to capture a lot of the potential incoming growth but Lemmy doesn't need to chase that growth entirely. It can grow at its own pace and handle what it can handle.