Having said that, is it really the end of the world if large Lemmy instances have ads to make up for any shortfall in donations? Otherwise, how are large instances expected to be sustainable long term, especially if they’re going to ever reach the kinds of traffic Reddit sees?
i’d say 6-7k users would be a better figure, but i do agree with your overall point. anything above 10-15k just hurts the health of the federation in the long term and ends up creating “untouchable” servers. even worse on lemmy where communities are also bound to instances.
though now that i’m thinking about it, a better metric would be active users rather than total users
I just gave 2k because it seems that today it’s the sweet spot in terms of resources consumption, and thus cost. Maybe that can evolve in the future?
But thanks federation, that should not affect the experience too much. You could even imagine large instances such as LW having LWprime, LWsecond, etc.