On the point of being unsustainable I disagree. Instances will need to find an equilibrium between cost/expense and retention of old content. The higher the revenue/cost tolerance, the older the content that can be retained. I expect most instances will end up purging non-local content after an amount of time, but retain local content as long as possible. Maybe I'm naive, but I have confidence that people smarter than me will come up with systems to do this. It may result in a usenet style setup where instances boast about their retention periods.

On your second point re: community contributions, I agree entirely. I've been very fortunate that there have been some generous donations from aussie.zone users, so I'm not worried about server costs at this point. Server costs will go up as data volumes increase, that is unavoidable. How the community decides to handle this in the future is the real question, based on what I've experienced so far I'm confident we'll be around for a long time to come.

Capitalism isn't Sustainable(or efficient). There is a lot of overhead to make sure the wage slaves stay in line(Managment, and middle managment), and to make sure the wage slaves don't sue the company(HR), and to clean up the buildings the wage slaves work at(Janitors), and the cost of the building, all that plus, taxes, paying the greedy shareholders(The largest cost), Marketing(Ads).

Its A LOT simpler when its just a server and someone who enjoys working on it. People who keep repeating that this isn't sustainable don't know how shitty capitalism is. Its not the servers that are unsustainable its the parasites on top.

FWIW - the homepage here say's this Lemmy instance has 182 monthly users. That post says it's costing $49/month to run it.

That means "your share" of the costs, assuming everybody chips in, would be about $0.30 per month.

A much more realistic assumption is that maybe 10% (and probably less) of all users will pay up, so if you want to have this place thrive without the admin/owner wondering how much money they're gonna have to pony up themselves you should be thinking that your "ad free" experience here deserves a donation of at least $3 per month. I figure $5 per month isn';t gonna hurt me, and signed up to donate that. (you're welcome, any of you other 17 or so other people who can't afford to support aussie.zone...)

Reddit was enshittified because they need the ad revenue to pay out their investors. Let's not make Lodion wonder WFT he's doing running aussie.zone because he's out of pocket every month in hosting costs...

It's much more cost-effective, for everyone involved, in a decentralized platform. All those big company server costs are broken up into dozens eventually hundreds and thousands of different servers just like World Wide Web itself, with websites for each community, right? Communities chip in to buy Little League shirts for their town baseball teams, we set up websites for our book sales and bake sales, school PTAs are able to accomplish great things because their parent communities can afford to help in smaller circles.

Decentralization doesn't just decentralize the data. It also decentralizes the semantics, the funding, etc.

This is why I donate to all my instances. I'm happy to donate some to have an ad free experience. It's totally worth it

Yeah, but the amount of money needed to cover server costs is way lower than the amount you need to run Reddit with all its corporate overhead and need to generate returns for the investors that have sunk a billion dollars into the platform.

Lemmy just needs to cover costs.

Have people pay a small fee to engage with the community. Ad revenue is not the only way to make money, remember the good old days when people actually paid for services that provide value?

Start with relying on donations and then make make it mandatory if required.

Ad revenue is a good way to make big profits, not just revenue, not something that we are interested in.

How does one donate to lemmy.world

Interesting, thanks for posting!

Here me out

The only way Lemmy can remain this way, and be able to afford the rising cost of server upkeep is to rely on ad revenue generated by bots, generated on dead websites. Now ofcourse the people running the servers would need to also own these ad riddled websites.

The way it would work, is droves of AI get trained to surf the internet, click on click bait, look at ads, and simply simulate human foot traffic.

This money would then go towards server upkeep in the fediverse.

It's kind of a loophole.

Huh even with adblockers from the early 2010s, some still manage to sneak through for me and I even use pi.hole on my network

It's coming. I guarentee it.

I use Firefox + ublock origin on Android and it is just as effective as desktop.

Same not only is corporate media filled with ads, there is no quality control. I installed an adblocker in june but it is good to have a place where I don't need to use it in the first place.