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No one is decentralizing for the sake of it. People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single serve

No one is decentralizing for the sake of it. People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin. By decentralizing, it becomes possible to run your own community of 10k to 100k people. Which is plenty large enough for most people's purposes. 100k active monthly users is going to be far larger than most subreddits. Even large subreddits, like /r/hardware, only had ~10,000 monthly active users or so, if I remember the sidebar statistics. So you can run your own instance today on bog-standard servers using one of these OSS software packages.

kaba0 3y ago
> People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin. Is it? If only a tint percentage of the userbase would donate some negligible amount, it can run indefinitely. Computers are insanely cheap compared to the possible value they can produce. Also, if they wouldn’t put random websocket connections for no good reason than it would scale much better (khm, lemmy)
user_named 3y ago
This is really revisionist. I have never ever heard pro-decentralization people argue that centralization is too expensive. No, the argument is focused on power.
- dragontamer 3y ago
  Arguments online don't really matter that much. $10/month to $1000/month is something that can be afforded by various hobbyists. There are limitations to what small money can accomplish, but these limitations are far larger than people may expect. Running your own https://blah.foobar.com https://blah.foobar.com community is about what you can accomplish with your two hands. ---------------- No one can make a "Reddit clone" by themselves, and its impossible to expect a $10/server to handle any kind of realistic traffic. But if you're just aiming for a boutique instance for your guildmates in WoW to hang out (and maybe federate over to a few niche Lemmy-instances like https://programming.dev https://programming.dev), that's well within the budget of small hobbyist weekend project.

kaba0 3y ago

> People are decentralizing because it gets damn expensive to run more than 100,000+ users (or so) on a single server that is owned by a hobbyist / part-time sysadmin. Is it? If only a tint percentage of the userbase would donate some negligible amount, it can run indefinitely. Computers are insanely cheap compared to the possible value they can produce. Also, if they wouldn’t put random websocket connections for no good reason than it would scale much better (khm, lemmy)

user_named 3y ago

This is really revisionist. I have never ever heard pro-decentralization people argue that centralization is too expensive. No, the argument is focused on power.

dragontamer 3y ago
Arguments online don't really matter that much. $10/month to $1000/month is something that can be afforded by various hobbyists. There are limitations to what small money can accomplish, but these limitations are far larger than people may expect. Running your own https://blah.foobar.com https://blah.foobar.com community is about what you can accomplish with your two hands. ---------------- No one can make a "Reddit clone" by themselves, and its impossible to expect a $10/server to handle any kind of realistic traffic. But if you're just aiming for a boutique instance for your guildmates in WoW to hang out (and maybe federate over to a few niche Lemmy-instances like https://programming.dev https://programming.dev), that's well within the budget of small hobbyist weekend project.