Why YSK: Getting along in a new social environment is easier if you understand the role you’ve been invited into.
It has been said that “if you’re not paying for the service, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.”
It has also been said that “the customer is always right”.
Right here and now, you’re neither the customer nor the product.
You’re a person interacting with a website, alongside a lot of other people.
You’re using a service that you aren’t being charged for; but that service isn’t part of a scheme to profit off of your creativity or interests, either. Rather, you’re participating in a social activity, hosted by a group of awesome people.
You’ve probably interacted with other nonprofit Internet services in the past. Wikipedia is a standard example: it’s one of the most popular websites in the world, but it’s not operated for profit: the servers are paid-for by a US nonprofit corporation that takes donations, and almost all of the actual work is volunteer. You might have noticed that Wikipedia consistently puts out high-quality information about all sorts of things. It has community drama and disputes, but those problems don’t imperil the service itself.
The folks who run public Lemmy instances have invited us to use their stuff. They’re not business people trying to make a profit off of your activity, but they’re also not business people trying to sell you a thing. This is, so far, a volunteer effort: lots of people pulling together to make this thing happen.
Treat them well. Treat the service well. Do awesome things.
Furthermore, even if you wanted to operate an instance on a small scale you’d still have to deal with the full volume of posts from the rest of the Lemmyverse getting pulled and saved to your instance. If we had Reddit levels of activity here, every instance host with more than a couple dozen users would basically end up maintaining their own personal database copy of Reddit (more or less, provided those users were still joining the popular communities across the 'verse) which doesn’t sound like something I’d want to deal with as a hobbyist.
Good point. But thinking further I guess saving this data amount is less of a problem than serving it to users. Maybe someone hosting a Lemmy instance can comment on this better, but they’re all pretty busy right now ig ^^