Some people might find the answer to be obvious (yes) but I’ve rarely found it so. In fact, this is a question I often find in the linux community (regarding linux going mainstream, not lemmy) and people are pretty split upon it.
On one hand, you may get benefits like more activity, more content, more people to interact with, a greater chance you’ll find someone to talk to on some specific subject.
On the other, you could run into an eternal September like reddit, where Lemmy would lose its culture, and have far more spam and moderation issues.
I don’t know, what do you think?
I want to be more popular than it is now but not mainstream. Just big enough that there’s a passionate community but not big enough that anyone has the urge to sell out.
Same. I’d love for us to grow, but never at the expense of it becoming overwhelming. I’d much rather have a bunch of smaller, community / interest focused, interconnected instances, than a giant one that values growth above all.
Our goal for this instance at least is just for it to be an enjoyable experience.
Would it actually be that bad having a giant commercial-centric instance, ie. something closer to Reddit than Lemmy. I mean imagine if Reddit could federate with Lemmy right now, then you could still choose the instance you want, but subscribe to the mainstream sphere that you also want to follow.
Someone could start one, but I doubt many would use it, as most ppl don’t like seeing ads.
I think you’re right, It’s probably hard to find a business model around federation. Maybe it could work for enterprice on premise setups, similar to how Matrix is used in German healthcare. But I don’t see how that would map to Lemmy in particular.
IMO the only funding that federation needs, is for developers, not really hosting costs. Most instances can be run on $5-10 dollar a month VPS’s.
Wikipedia has the best model (or at least used to, nowadays they have far more funding than they could ever need, and their requests are just annoying), where they do yearly funding drives. When our NLNet funding runs out, we will most likely have to do something similar in order to continue working on lemmy full-time.
Its a sad state of affairs, because most fediverse projects have < 3 developers, yet we all make less in donations than the average youtuber with a patreon. Eventually I think it’ll be a good idea to have yearly campaigns where we share all the fediverse projects that need funding, along with their liberapay / OpenCollective accounts. We all would prefer to stay donation funded, to remain free of any business or political entanglements.
Right, it’s a shame that there isn’t a better culture for supporting developers like there are for other things online. Maybe it’s because you rarely see the actual person(s) behind the software, as you do with say influencers or streamers.
Maybe platforms like Open Collective can help making open software more financially viable. I also like the trend of big corporations sponsoring the software they build upon, like for example Blender: https://fund.blender.org/
Babel (a web compiler) also wrote a relevant blog post some month ago Babel is used by millions, so why are we running out of money?