Fediverse

Imo admins have a responsibility to disable signups to their server if they feel they are unable to fund/crowdsource or lack the ability to expand capacity (lack of time or know-how).

As long as server admins stick to the above it doesn't matter if it costs €10 or €100000 a month really.

Its impossible to say at which point is the burden too much, because every person has their own threshold and every server can have multiple admins responsible for it, or might have business backing it or whatever really.

lemm.ee admin did setup crowdfunding option and the needed amount was filled quite fast, so i guess it is more about whether or not the admin of the instance have technical ability and will to upscale the solution with rising number of users.

it might get different story once the normal users start surpassing the early adopters in numbers (the penetration of people willing to contribute might get gradually lower).

That seems to be rather too large already.

There are probably not many admins willing to pay 80 euro a month out of their own pocket for a hobby and donations are better considered to be "nice to have" and should preferrably not be essential to keep the server alive.

This is a fantastic point. The more the financial burden falls on one person, the more likely it is that at some point the expense will become too great for that individual admin to carry.

So from a financial perspective it makes a lot of sense to have many small/medium sized instances rather than a few large ones.

You suggest when an instance reaches a given size, stop recommending it. Totally agree. Based on known expenses for instances, it might not be a bad idea to have a recommended threshold (number of users) at which to stop or slow signups as well.

There are several places that would need to be updated when it comes to recommending instances. One that comes to my mind right away is apps. Several apps only list the top 4-5 instances when signing up. And default to Lemmy.world. It’s not a great situation to be in, but I think we can make a change if this info gets circulated more broadly.

From what I’ve seen on these larger instances, they’re taking in a lot of $$$ in donations.

You might get the same problem that exist in FOSS people won't get paid and quality will decline (like heartbleed etc), Also you want to allow big communities without splitting them which is bad UX.

You are basically asking people to work for free for you (no point in sugar coating it), and honestly if people want to volunteer there are more important goals , we should have full time people working on managing instance IMO .

It is not just the number of users, but also the number of communities and subscribers.

I believe that an instance can reach 10k users and have a couple hundred communities without too many issues, i.e, you could run things on one well-tuned database, perhaps add master-slave replication and scale your webservers horizontally.

I do have in my mind that if my instance ever gets to this size (fingers crossed), I will close registrations and only open again to replace churned customers.