How will mastodon servers manage the current influx of users over time? Do enough users donate, or will instances charge their users at some point? Are there any advertisement driven instances? Which instances have the most realistic business model?
I was pondering how this is going to fly after further growth, with increasing expenses, when maintenance becomes a chore, and as life happens to instance admins. #mastodon #twitter
@trinsec yeah, but if there's 100 million users on mastodon one day, that's going to be a lot of servers and admins. There will be many busted disks and forgotten bills every year without some organisation to handle. I predict some unstable services and orphaned instances as the fun wears off and admins get busy with other stuff.
@kefir It happens, nothing new. I've had my time on a dying instance too (hardware failure, nothing was recovered) and simply moved on. For most people it's just social media, you shouldn't base your life on it.
For organizations, companies, etc, they're best off hosting their own server instead with their own domain, and where only their employees can have an account.
Managing user influx is up to the individual server/instance owners to set the limits based on their own hardware. Qoto's admin seems pretty on top of things and quite proficient, so I doubt you'll see any capacity issues or if you do, that they'll last long.
As far as donations/advertisers, that's all a per-instance answer. I'm still trying to make my way around and find a good instance to settle in to (the 30-day wait to move between instances is a bit of a pain) and to answer your question: I HAVE seen a couple of instances that are pay-to-join. Can't think of any that run any sort of ads, though. The only way they really could might be to have a bot post ads periodically, but I'd figure most people would just block it. You could probably do some odd Javascript or something to inject ads in to a timeline, but it probably wouldn't be worth the trouble.
Instances don't really have business models. There are some, like the instance tied to OpenStreetmap (a GoogleMaps/AppleMaps alternative) that run off the same donations as their parent projects, but for the most part the Fediverse seems to be a non-commercial effort.
For the Fediverse being decentralized, that's just how it's designed and how it's always worked since... probably 2008 or 2011, maybe 2018, depending on who you ask.
As for growth changes? I guess we'll see when everyone's done freaking out about whatever twitter's doing right now. I'd offer up that this is a bigger social media upset than when everyone dropped MySpace for Facebook, but it may just flame out. I'd say wait at least six months before making any determinations regarding the blue bird.
From a technical standpoint, unless people are uploading tons of large files (the definitions of which can be set by the admin), most Fedi storage is pretty light for small groups. You can store more text than a county of people could read on a ~~300 GB~~ 500 GB hard drive (about $20 online for a refurbished one) and still have plenty of room left over for an OS, Fedi software, avatar pics, and some light uploading by your users. You could also run an instance for yourself and a few close friends off a single-board computer and a free/cheap domain proxy/dynamic DNS.
I've got three SBCs and an old box with DDR3 RAM in it, none of which I'm currently using, so I could easily run four instances on hardware I already have laying around. You could, too if you have some unused/underused hardware.
I feel like I've rambled enough, so I'll stop here.
@kefir Instances can limit their amount of users to ensure they don't need bigger machines to be able to keep up with the influx.
Some instances stick to 5k users, some to 100k. I don't know what we stick at but so far we still have capacity.