I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I’m not really clear on the way the networking works with federated systems.
Say that an instance decided to charge a subscription fee, would they then have to defederate from free instances on a cost basis alone? To handle server load for requests from those instances?
Or, say that subscription was sustainable, would there be anything stopping someone from making a free instance to give users full access to that subscription-based content? The answer there is defederation right?
Trying to work out in my head how this system could be scalable without communities becoming walled gardens and thus removing part of the appeal of federation.
In part you can see this already - there are a bunch of
serversthat most lemmy instances have defederated from. In these cases information flow is one way - f.e. lemmmy.world doesn’t get any updates fromfoo.baz, doesn’t provide search results, communities, etc.Subscription would make sense when the added value you provide is 1) availability guarantees, 2) performance guarantees, 3) membership guarantees, 4) moderation / content filtering options