I know there’s donations and the owners can use their own money, but there’s a limit. I doubt a platform with hundreds of thousands of daily users can survive with only donations.
By having more instances and better user distribution. Running a small-ish instance isn’t very expensive, around 5-10 euro a month (some VPS providers are cheaper, etc). As Lemmy development continues, and more optimizations come in, these smaller lemmy instances will be able to support more users.
There is also a discussion on GitHub to introduce user and community migrations between instances. So once that feature is implemented, it will be easier to redistribute everything across all Lemmy instances.
Most instances will hit a hard cap where the user support can’t scale anymore. Admins will have to close sign-ups and force new users to other instances to distribute the load. That’s the point of federation.
The issue is admins do not yet know where the limits are, and Lemmy still needs a lot more backend optimization work.
