- Use distributed, federated services like Lemmy, mastodon etc.
- Support the hosts with our own funds.
- Moderate our own communities.
The second point is the most important. Reddit happened because they are a corporate entity seeking profit. Let’s own our social media platforms by actively contributing funds to them.
Lemmy isn’t distributed like that. Each instance does its own user and community management with local storage and processing. The community content - posts and comments - gets distributed to any other instance that asks for it, and that instance then presents it to its users. The result is that the content is replicated & distributed across many instances, and the load of presenting that content to users is shared.
So, running your own instance, where you’re the only user, will cause that instance to fetch whatever communities you’ve subscribed to via API. That probably reduces, slightly, the load on those servers, but it’s not going to be a huge effect.
Running your own instance and getting a dozen or a hundred friends to use it instead of lemmy.world or feddit.de, on the other hand…
Ah gotcha.
Isn’t that a hard barrier/limit to scale then (as well as support)? Would it even be possible to run say a 5 million user Lemmy instance with a single write postgres DB (I assume compute can be load balanced, you can utilize CDNs for media content, can heavily cache the API, and that it supports read replicas?)
Nevermind 10, 30, or 50 million user communities 🤔
Though at that point you’re essentially just lighting your bank account on fire for infra costs.