I find it's going to need to get even more convenient for the general public to be interested in it. Federation almost needs to be a 'background' process that the end user doesn't really need to deal with. Otherwise, it'll be a little too complicated or obscure to comprehend for most. I know it isn't rocket science but we're talking about the general public, here.

Admin of a tiny instance with some somewhat active communities here. Monetary cost is almost zero because my lemmy instance runs on my own hardware. It uses around 250mb of ram and 50gb of storage which is pretty much nothing. Im currently not looking for any sort of donation

Cost of hosting an instance is highly variable based on the way it's hosted, the size of the instance, and what sort of instance it is (since there's many different kinds such as mastodon, peertube, Lemmy, etc)

Self hosting from home can cost just the price of hardware and power. Once you outsource hosting as many large instances do the price starts to rise. It's the large instances that start asking for donations as well, since it does cost more and more.

The fediverse vs. Big tech is the tortoise and the hare. It keeps slowly growing and as big tech takes a nap under a tree and pisses more people off by making more bad decisions. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about the concept -- email is federated and most boomers are just fine with email.

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

This is a common question from newcomers, and it's not necessarily a bad one, just worth being aware of this to better understand some of the responses you may see. Something else to keep in mind is that there is no collective, united Fediverse community in the way that you might sorta see on some bigger tech platforms (albeit even on those, there's not really a singular community either).

What this means is that there's no combined community effort from folks across the Fediverse to attract new users, and since it's all loosely connected communities driving it all, there's no market push to popularize them as you're more apt to see from the tech industry. In fact, if you wander into some parts of the Fediverse, you'll find some folks far happier to keep their communities small and to themselves for a variety of reasons, sometimes conflating the tech and their community (i.e. a popularization of Lemmy as tech wouldn't mean their little Lemmy community instance had to link up with every other one).

That said, there are also plenty of folks around here interested in the question and planning/discussing drawing in more folks. Some of those discussions being about improvements to the technology to make it less jank and comfortable for less technically inclined users, others about how to present it without getting in the weeds of the tech details, and some just by trying to post interesting/entertaining content to keep folks interested past a glance. There's as many ways to approach it as there are Fediverse communities, and so there's not really been any one way that people have been going about it.

im running a bare bones instance, just starting to get some users. i am using one of the higher cost providers in AWS, and my total costs are ~$1.02/day. i could probably get to about 25 users before i have to double these costs in the form of the next tier of hosting, but then i could probably scale to 250-500 users. for ~2$/day. i can imagine donations allowing me to scale to many thousands of users before the leecher/donation ratio tips.

its not that expensive, but then, i dont have a ton of leechers either.

attracting users? no idea. i hate social media. im here for the sysadminin'

1. It depends. The majority cost is your time spend at troubleshooting. The electricity cost is couple dozen euro per month. (VPS or selfhost on your hardware)

lemmy.world reports monthly expenses around €1,200 per month, but they're also running multiple other services for that expense. Those costs are all covered by donations.

Smaller Lemmy instances are much less expensive. I've seen admins comment that they pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month.

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?

Right now everything is funded through donations though it's not clear how feasible that is in the long term. I wouldn't be surprised if some instances run ads in the future.

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse?

Maturation. It's just that most Fediverse sites outside of Mastodon aren't ready for prime time. Lemmy just recently started getting great apps and stabilization updates. Other projects like Kbin aren't there yet. I think it'll take time before the Fediverse has an easy onboarding process.