The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
The Fediverse needs to encourage different instances. It’s the only way it can work. It has the technical framework to do it and for it to be transparent to the enduser but I feel like it’s not there yet.
For example I think users should be strongly encourages to chose regional instances instead of lemmy.world (I know know, ironic coming from me). It should be default and require the user to go out of their way to select a different instance. It should also be concisely explained that your instance doesn’t matter and that you can see any other federated instance. Yes, this is not always true but it doesn’t matter to someone just joining. Let them get here first and then they’ll naturally learn about the intricacies. Don’t scare them away at the gates.