I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
The Fediverse will never be monetized. It’s open by nature, instances are maintained by donations and out of the administrator’s pocket. Why? Because they have a passion for it.
Even if someone chooses to monetize one instance, people will move to another that isn’t monetized. It’s free and open by design, and will always be that way.
I’ll bet money that multiple people will successfully monetize parts of it.
At the very least, my guess is some small shops will build businesses around apps that offer enhanced users experiences, but for fees. I’d be willing to pay for premium experiences that were well maintained.
And if they somehow manage to do that, people will download their data and move to another instance or spin up their own, and they’ll get the exact same content. It’s the open nature of the Fediverse, it’s impossible or at least incredibly difficult to monetize.
Time will tell. People seem to be pretty down to support devs and studios that are using the money to enhance the user experience and pay the developers fairly. Apollo, Twitterific, Tweetbot, etc. lots of good examples of this.
I do have a question about how the instances and federation would work. If you are in an instance like lemmy.world, and it is federating with any other instance, then the content is being loaded from some other server, right? so if there is a large server with millions of users, could that server federate with a small server that isn’t ready to handle the traffic of millions of users and basically kill it? or the server has a way to prevent being federated into another instance?
i am still trying to learn about fediverse
Nah, that’s not quite right.
Tiny federates with huge - nothing happens, they just exchange metadata. Dancer@tiny subs to something on huge - now you have one community, with a lot of updates, coming at tiny. Maybe it drops some. Still not an issue
Hugo@huge subs to something on tiny - now something@tiny is cached on huge, still not a problem.
Now something@tiny is in the feed on huge. A million people comment. This is a problem… For huge mostly. Over at little, people are commenting on something@tiny. They might see doubled up comments or orphaned comments, but mostly they just don’t see most of the stuff from huge
So generally, it’s not an issue. In certain situations, there will be hiccups, but it will keep chugging along
I think the small instance can temporarily defederate to reduce the load. kbin.social had to do this during the first reddit exodus because they grew too much too fast and couldn’t handle the load.