three idea was more, how the single instances can finance themselves. network traffic and storage need to be paid somehow.
I'm not sure how the federated system works exactly and how much a small instance would need to mirror or pipe through, when the users subscribe to large communities on another instance.
so I was wondering, how instances with a small user base can keep up financially - bigger ones can probably live of donations. If a small instance doesn't need much space or traffic, because subscriptions on remote instances are directly handled on the remote instance, than this is probably no problem.
I'm thinking of setting up my own small server and am not sure what exactly to expect...