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.
fewer users is only a problem when you’re profiting off of it
Yeah good luck meaningfully using a Lemmy instance with barely any users.
There’s a reason both Lemmy and Mastodon only really started taking off when the equivalent proprietary platforms drove users away - a service like this needs users to create content.
Also the guy you’re replying to is right, stuff like this already happened in the past; look at the centralization of email (which is also federated) for example.