I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
As a small instance owner, I can say its not sustainable. I’m paying approximately $40 monthly out of my pocket but with it, I have a non-defederated, long-term instance. So I don’t mind much, just enjoying Lemmy.
I think the real problem is not financial, but technical problems. For example, when a post is shared in an instance, that instance sends that activity to approximately 1000 other active instances. As a result, as the number of instances increases, the load on the network also increases. Ironically I think it should be the other way around :) I’m not sure how it will scale in the future.
In addition, since each instance keeps all the data in its own database, the database size of the instance with 1m users and the instance with 1k users is the same. In my opinion, this is what is really unsustainable.