this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2023
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Asklemmy
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It's certainly a challenge. I run three instances on the #fediverse. Two small ones and a larger one with 450 users. I have a donation page; initially people were enthusiastic and I covered costs. Now, I have regular monthly donators but not enough to cover costs so I am subsidising it. I took the decision when I launched that it could happen and it's my problem.
I think there will be many instances will fall away in the coming months due to costs. Especially if you are thousands of users and associated costs.
We need to come up with a new funding model, where people appreciate you get nothing for nothing. All the large corporates sell your data as advertising for revenue. The greater public do not appreciate they are selling their soul.
Is there an approximate specs per number of users guide to size a lemmy instance?
I haven't seen one yet. Disk usage this morning on lemmy.world was reported at about 4GB over 11 days (probably low usage). The 100GB drive would probably fill up in 275 days or so if usage did not increment. If it's not redundant and dies, all that content is lost.
So storage will be a huge issue for lemmy unless I'm missing something.
100GB is practically nothing nowadays.
There are people (myself included, not to brag) running home servers with literally hundreds of terabytes of data. At that ~0.3 GB/day number, I alone could host 3,500 years worth of data. Get some of those r/DataHoarders and r/HomeLab guys on here and Lemmy would never run out of space.
Can content be stored somewhere like S3 instead of spinning disk? It would certainly be more robust and cheaper.
Yeah, I'd love to get an approximate sense of how much these instances cost
Unfortunately, you can't equate resource usage to number of users.
500 users will use more than 5 times the resources of 100 users, because activity feeds on activity. But it gets worse than being non-linear.
If you judge you're using as many resources as you comfortably can at 500 users and close registrations, you will soon exceed your resource capacity anyway. Why? Because users who register elsewhere will increase your federation activity and therefore resource requirements.