Yes, I’m certain I could final answers to all these questions via research, but I’m coming here as part of the Reddit diaspora. My guess is that there’s a benefit to others like me to have this discussion.
I can vaguely understand the federation concept, the idea that my account is hosted at an individual Lemmy server and that other servers trust that one to validate my account. What’s the network flow like? I’m posting this to the lemmy.ml /asklemmy community, but I’m composing it on the sh.itjust.works interface. I’m assuming sh.itjust.works hands this over to lemmy.ml. How does my browsing work? Is all of my traffic routed through sh.itjust.works?
Assuming there’s a mass influx of redditors, what does it look like as things fail? I’m assuming some servers can keep up under the load and some can’t. If sh.itjust.works goes down under the load, can I still browse other servers? Or, do those servers think I should have some token from sh.itjust.works, because my cookies say I’m still logged in, and I can’t even do that?
Are there easy mechanisms to allow me to grab my post history?
I’m assuming most (all?) Lemmy servers are hosted in home labs? The idea of Lemmy excites me, but the growth pain that could be coming scares me. Anybody using a CDN in front of their servers? That could be good, but with unconstrained growth, that could be costly, which is very bad.
I can imagine lots of different worse case scenarios, but I’m curious what those of you who run servers imagine for the best case scenario? A manageable growth that just gets more vibrant communities, which can’t ever lead to the breadth and variety of Reddit?
Also, for those running servers, have any of you experienced issues during this growth? What scares you?
I'm wondering if Lemmy (and maybe the fediverse generally) has the potential to offer incoming Reddit mods something Reddit can't: compensation.
Obviously it won't be huge, but I feel like there's a greater chance that a Lemmy user will make at least small one-off or even regular donations to help keep their communities and/or instances running.
Like if I'm running a server, voluntarily paying $50/month as, say, the mod of a 20M+ user subreddit might, even if 20 users contribute $2.5, that's a full month's worth of server time paid for.
As I say, the scale would be quite low, but wonder if it could be an interesting idea to try out, even if just as a proof-of-concept.
There's definitely scope for this.
I know I would never pay for facebook / twitter / reddit. Not 1 cent, but I'm happily contributing to fosstodon on patreon each month - and I don't think I'm alone.
I think there's a not-insignificant segment of the population that are weary enough of the advertising revenue model that we're happy to pay to avoid it. The expectation that everything on the net should be free has ruined the net IMO.
In a maybe ironic twist, I'm more than happy to pay for sites that are truly free but completely unwilling to pay for "free" sites backed by ads, tracking, and corporate bullshit. I subscribed to the Lemmy dev's Patreon and I sponsor a few open source projects on GitHub but I would never pay for Twitter Blue, Reddit Gold, Discord Nitro, etc. I want to reward good behavior, not support bad. I also supported Mastodon for a while on Patreon but when they changed the Mastodon onboarding process to make it more centrallized I pulled back on that. I don't want to reward restriction of the openness the Fediverse provides, even if some subset of users can't figure it out.