this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.
There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.
Provided there is an "upper limit" on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn't private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn't exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we're trying to "solve" the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance's server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed "load balancing" on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a "federate" form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I'm not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That's why I'm saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That's where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their "free" idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.
Great link, and I fully agree. If it's possible anyways.