Truly loving this instance, and UK servers are clearly helping with speed for both the website version and API calls from Connect for Lemmy.
Thanks @tom@feddit.uk - your work is greatly appreciated (buy him a coffee!) and I truly hope Lemmy takes off as the new MANY front pages of the Internet. 🙂
My worry is about how this scales. It’s fast for now, but as we get more users it’ll slow down, and the costs will increase as the infra needs to scale up. There will be a point where Tom decides he doesn’t want to support it anymore or can’t.
I’d be quite interested to know the monthly costs for running the instance and what’s involved.
True, but it’s up to Tom if he wishes to be transparent about costs and/or donations received or not.
As I used to run a large server for a large community forum a few years ago - admin’ing something like this can sometimes be a very thankless task, and users will be sympathetic if you’re out of pocket (and only some will help) but as soon as they see you made a tiny bit of profit one month, they forget the fact that actually, you’re about £1k down at the moment, as this extra £62.32 I’ve made this mornth can go against that… ;-) Not to mention the free time given up to actually maintain and look after a busy server. So I’d totally understand if he didn’t want others telling him what he might be doing wrong with his costs, etc. “Oh, well, you could save £4.20 if you moved the whole service to this little unknown company … etc.” :)
I’m also hoping as the code for Lemmy matures, it becomes less memory-hungry and more CPU-friendly. The more help they get on Github to make it truly scalable, the better.
Time will tell! I’m just thankful for what we have now.
I’m not overly worried. There are plenty of Mastodon servers out there that have been running happily for years on donations. The running costs, while I’m sure aren’t insignificant, are also nowhere near what it takes for somewhere like Reddit.
The good thing with the Fediverse is that the more users it attracts, the more servers spring up to accomodate. That’s kind of the whole point, to balance the load between servers rather than have everyone on the same one.
Fediverse can be incredibly useful, especially when it has the financial support it needs to thrive. With the right backing, this platform can truly offer a unique and valuable experience for users.
The nature of it being a UK orientated instance will hopefully help to limit the appeal to manageable amount.