On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven’t even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the “server” is a hive of users’ computers all sharing the load? I’m a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?
We have to think about that a lot of people on the fediverse today ( and that number only grow the more people join ) that are normies. They expect it work the same exact way anything else works. And they won’t know or care to know any of the underlying technical things about it.
Personally I think self-hosting (Docker containers and stuff) would be a good solution, but for the Fediverse that would mean making a ‘family size’ edition of the server software.
I imagine if it became a common hobby and every geek interested supported ~4-25 friends, it might work.