What is the maximum number of active users on an instance before the financial burden gets too high for the admins?
What is the maximum number of active users on an instance before the financial burden gets too high for the admins?
Pretty straight question.
I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.
I also know that Lemmy devs said that
lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503
As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?
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.
Yeah, as long as we will still have people creating instances (for new people) this seems to be the way.
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.
donations should absolutely be considered essential.
it is relying on the admin paying out of their own pocket that is guaranteed way to hell ;)
This is a very short-sighted view. Once you set up things to depend on a regular project related income (donations or otherwise), the entire project lives or dies with it.
Even if donations right now are sufficient, sooner or later they will fall short and then the people running the service have no choice but to either close it down or try to find another source of income, such as advertisement or selling out to a company interested in the user data. The latter has already happened with such large Mastodon servers.
If you want to ensure that the Fediverse stays a healthy, non-corporate and humans-first environment, then being able to run (small) servers out of the admin's pocket is the only working solution. Of course it makes sense to try and find more than one admin and have all of them able and willing to cover expenses, but donations should always be just a "nice to have" on top of that.
Many people run rented servers with capacity to spare.
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.
Besides user count, the number of federated instances, posts, and comments will also increase server costs. Its possible that federating from many instances has a larger performance penalty than having a high user count.
That's another point. I guess over time some instances would aggregate in clusters. There is probably low interest for a niche software development English speaking instance to federate with a local Japan speaking city instance
I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see instances that are dedicated to individual subs/niche topics as things become more spread out. As the user base grows, it's just not realistic for a handful of instances to host virtually every popular sub across all of lemmy (or all of the fediverse that's visible from lemmy).
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That’s what Mastadon does. I’m on a very specific server, and I mostly follow folks on that server. But I can still follow anyone, of course.
Happy to see I'm not the only ont thinking that!
@hoodlem @Blaze I started out on Masthead dot social as my Mastodoninstance & then it imploded without an explanation, now I'm on a really small instance administered by someone I followed when on Masthead. There should be someway to migrate your account even without your original instance being involved, like a PGP public-private key implementation, getting users to normalize floating from instance to instance without a hiccup would alleviate concerns about the glut of users on 4-5 instances
From what I’ve seen on these larger instances, they’re taking in a lot of $$$ in donations.
Indeed, but what happens if the donations stop?
Well I’m not sure. I’d have to see the stats and specs used to run said instances. Lemm.ee alone has already generated enough cash to last quite a few years if they stopped today and kept the donations for the actual server/upgrades. sunaurus has already said he can pay it himself indefinitely.
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 .
You are basically asking people to work for free for you
No, the point I'm making is that it's easier to have a 3k instance requiring 80€ donations from its member, who would feel closer to the rest of the members and their administration team, than a 21k instance requiring 560€ per month.
To be honest, I also think that we should move away from the donations model to an open subscription model. 80€ per month for 3k users is 0,32€ per user, you can implement a system where users pay 0,5€ for their cost, and can even pay more and offer to cover the subscriptions costs for other users. That way you give a real sense of community among members, and allow the instance admins to have more financial stability.
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.
Very good point
"Churned customers?"
Yes, except for the first 250 registrations, my instance is a commercial fediverse provider only for paying subscribers.
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