this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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All you need to run a lemmy instance is a bit of time, a computer and an internet connection though, same as running any forum. The costs of all those are rapidly decreasing over time and are well within "eh who cares i'll just pay it" ranges; a smaller instance can easily be run for less than 5-10 bucks a month on the cloud, or for the cost of electricity if you have an old PC lying around.
A lot of costs of keeping servers running is employing people to do it; if its not too much hassle to keep one maintained, people will keep servers online.
Source: I run datacenters and support various cloud apps
Wouldnt you need an increasing amount of storage over time, including backup/redundency solutions in case of hardware failure? Who stores all the posts/comments?
Also, what about bigger instances, that will keep growing the more popular lemmy gets?
Yes, but it's not just 1 instance you have to worry about. For this to go well, dozens even hundreds of instances have to stay around. If we start losing large chunks of our history or some parts go down here and there it's not going to survive. This is my third account due to how many issues I was having posting weeks back with the different major instances being overloaded. Even then, most of the posts I'm interacting with are hosted there and from time to time there are errors.
Also Images are a huge burden.
I just embrace impermanence. Fediverse is not much other than some other person's server, and if the instance owner decides he doesn't want to host his instance anymore, you're just gonna have to cut your losses and move somewhere else. It's not as if the entirety of Lemmy is gonna stop existing at once.
The real threat to Lemmy's existence is the maintenance of the software. If that stops, there are 2 options, either someone forks it, or the medium slowly dies out as no one feels like hosting outdated software anymore.
In that case (which, might I add, is unlikely to happen), you're gonna have to cut your losses, and move to a different type of social media
I'm less concerned with instances going away, although that would be annoying if it happened frequently. I'm most concerned with performance. When you have to rely on a web of different hosts to be all fully working at the same time for the experience to be smooth there are going to be more problems inevitably.
You just described the internet lol
Twenty years ago maybe. Since then there have been a handful of sites that most people visit, and in the last 15 years or so they hardly ever went down.
I'm guessing you don't work for a large corp if you think sites don't go down or have backend issues all the time lol
Iโm talking about on a regular basis or for long.