Over the years I have self-hosted a ton of stuff for people on the internet. So much, in fact, that I started a little non-profit to sort of make it “more official”. I love to help people, and people are truly grateful when I set something up for them. So I continue to do it. That being said, it can get expensive.
Funding is the biggest risk we face, as users, if we want to see the fediverse be a good long-term solution. Lemmy instances, be that .world or otherwise, do not have VCs backing them that can burn money for years on end like other tech startups. They are either able to pay for the services, or they don’t exist.
So, I implore you: please consider donating to any of the fediverse instances that you enjoy. Shifting the internet’s collective mindset towards paying for the social services we use could really be the beginning of something special.
Here are links to the .world Patreon and Open Collective:
Tangentially related, but is there an effort underway to archive fediverse content? I think the danger of federation is the loss of a valuable knowledge base if an instance goes offline.
That’s my biggest fear too. And even with archiving if you spend all that time growing a community and the instance just dies then you have to rebuild the community from scratch on a different server. It seems oddly risky because without secured funding who knows which instances might die and when.
I think long term there might need to be some form of revenue from the site just to ensure needs are met and incentivize devs/admins to stick with it. But maybe the donations will surprise me and things will go smooth like wikipedia.
By definition, a copy of every post, comment, community, and user profile exists on every instance that federates with another instance. Data preservation should be trivial, even without a proper archive.
I could imagine a scenario where a popular instance owner goes rogue and brings down their server, only for the whole thing to be restored from federated copies by some other group.