How will lemmy instances survive if they get too big?
I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.
Wikipedia is different. Everybody knows it, basically everybody uses it (some more, some less, of course), i.e. it has a much higher range than any fediverse system will have in the foreseeable future. There is basically no competition - if you are looking for a free online universal encyclopaedia, you will land at Wikipedia. And Wikimedia is recognized as a charitable organization in many countries, often meaning that donations to it are tax deductible.
That said, Wikimedia's donations are much, much more than what would be required to run the servers. They have all kinds of expensive projects running. They are good and useful and all, but not required to keep Wikipedia online, and only a tiny fraction of Wikimedia's budget goes to the servers. To run a fediverse instance, you don't need all that overhead.
Most instances will hit a hard cap where the user support can’t scale anymore. Admins will have to close sign-ups and force new users to other instances to distribute the load. That’s the point of federation.
The issue is admins do not yet know where the limits are, and Lemmy still needs a lot more backend optimization work.
As opposed to a corperate social media site, Lemmy has waaaay lower operating costs (not servers). It’s open source so dev work is volunteer, and there isn’t a bunch of resources dedicated to squeezing users for every penny or appeasing advertisers.
Servers can get pricey for sure, but not having all of that other overhead goes a ways to making it more sustainable.
That sort of thing should be a self-correcting problem to an extent - when performance drops, people will (hopefully) move to other intances. Also, a well-managed instance would stop accepting new members before it go to that point.
By having more instances and better user distribution. Running a small-ish instance isn’t very expensive, around 5-10 euro a month (some VPS providers are cheaper, etc). As Lemmy development continues, and more optimizations come in, these smaller lemmy instances will be able to support more users.
There is also a discussion on GitHub to introduce user and community migrations between instances. So once that feature is implemented, it will be easier to redistribute everything across all Lemmy instances.
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