this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
538 points (98.0% liked)
Fediverse
32364 readers
291 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to !moderators@lemmy.world!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration)
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn't be treated as a disposable entity who don't need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.
It's a "I want you to want to do the dishes" kind of thing.
Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying "you know what? You don't want to help me, so I don't owe your lot anything".
Are those Lemmy instances, or other software like Mastodon?
Mastodon because it is the largest number of instances and users, but the principle is the same. It hasn't happened with Lemmy yet because this subset of the Fediverse is ridiculously small compared to Mastodon/Pixelfed
Mastodon is also an ultra-heavyweight in terms of compute resources it consumes per daily active user served. This is one reason (among multiple) that I would never run Mastodon as an ActivityPub microblogging instance.
Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?
Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn't designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.
I've seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don't have a strong caching system.
So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.