Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don’t know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?
There’s no need to answer these questions. I’m not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.
(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the “all” feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)
Yes obviously the barrier to entry is high. But nobody knows for the big servers either since they are basically just small instances that happened to get big. Thats why lemmy.fmhy.ml just died one day due to domain seizure. End of the day all you can do is look at how long a server has been around and if it has be online a reasonable amount of time. That kind of reputation just increases slowly and nobody can make it happen faster.
That’s a false dichotomy. My instance is part of my larger suite of services that I provide on communick. I’ve pledged to have the first 250 users for free forever, after that access will be given through the paid plans, which is basically $8/year. I’m also planning to contribute 10% of my revenue to the lemmy developers.
If this instance ever gets big enough to the point that it can pay itself and a salary to me (I’m guessing around ~10k users), I would simply close the instance for registrations. The reason for doing it is that I’d rather see the fediverse with thousands of small-medium sized instances instead of concentrated in a handful of servers like we have now.
Because using random tiny servers is worse in other ways. With all due respect, nobody knows you and they don’t know how committed you are or how much time you have. When your server gets DDoSed or hits a bug causing data loss, what will you do? Do you have the technological know-how to recover and quickly? If your server suddenly grew and it became more expensive to run, how does anyone know if you will keep paying the bills? If Lemmy has a bad zero day, will you upgrade quickly?
There’s no need to answer these questions. I’m not actually asking you personally. But these are the kinds of questions that users have to worry about from random, small, unproven instances.
(Also, Lemmy does not favour small instances because the “all” feed, searching, and going to new communities are all better the more diverse users you have.)
Yes obviously the barrier to entry is high. But nobody knows for the big servers either since they are basically just small instances that happened to get big. Thats why lemmy.fmhy.ml just died one day due to domain seizure. End of the day all you can do is look at how long a server has been around and if it has be online a reasonable amount of time. That kind of reputation just increases slowly and nobody can make it happen faster.
That’s a false dichotomy. My instance is part of my larger suite of services that I provide on communick. I’ve pledged to have the first 250 users for free forever, after that access will be given through the paid plans, which is basically $8/year. I’m also planning to contribute 10% of my revenue to the lemmy developers.
If this instance ever gets big enough to the point that it can pay itself and a salary to me (I’m guessing around ~10k users), I would simply close the instance for registrations. The reason for doing it is that I’d rather see the fediverse with thousands of small-medium sized instances instead of concentrated in a handful of servers like we have now.
Anyway, I know that is just a data point, but here we have a (a) professionally managed instance (b) with a clear model for make it sustainable and © who still hasn’t managed to signup 30 users.