Reddit migrator here (shocking, I know)
Just wondering because I found out about all this yesterday and just realized the ammount of independent servers, but no sign of any ads or sponsors. So… is it all based on donations?
Also don’t just lurk, if you know you should answer because lemmy only counts users who posted or commented as active users.
Long term, I see business opportunities for ad supported or paid instances with enterprise level management (reliability, maintenance, scaling, backup). The important factor is that they can’t lock you in - if you decide you don’t like the policies at your current instance, go find a new one.
Would that make you lose your comment history and username? For example I needed to create separate accounts for Beehaw and here. It’s similar to using different forums in the late 90s/early 00s in that way it seems.
If an instance you had an account on went dark, you would lose access to that account, and the ability to view your comment history in isolation. As far as I can tell, the comments you made in communities would exist as long as the instance the community is on exists. Same with your username - there isn’t a mechanism for making them globally unique beyond appending the instance domain name (again, just like e-mail).
Beehaw is kind of a special case right now because they have chosen to cut themselves off from a number of other Lemmy instances including lemmy.world. Normally you wouldn’t need multiple accounts - I read and post on multiple instances from just my lemmy.world account. You can see remote instance communities under “Communities” / “All”. If one you are interested in isn’t there, you can search for !community@instance, and wait a bit. That starts the sync of the community to your instance, and you should be able to access it a few minutes later.
I think a good business model is similar to your idea, but with a twist:
Unless accounts become portable across instances, I could see best practices shifting towards users having their own personal instance so that they control it and thus can’t lose access to their history etc. But since ain’t nobody got time for that, I imagine the business model being companies providing turnkey personal instances and getting paid for hosting and management.
I suspect we may also see more instances focused on very specific topics to keep operating cost down.
Agree, and such instances would be more resilient to federation issues. I think communities should be spread out on small instances, while users are concentrated on larger instances with better infrastructure.
I utterly agree.