this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
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Costs rise exponentially as sites get larger. Moderation becomes more important, more team members have to come on board, overhead, etc.
From a platform standpoint, sure, it won’t go away. But the platform is meaningless without communities, and a system built to easily dismantle communities is questionable at best for longevity. This is my third or fourth Lemmy-esk account due to a random assortment of annoying issues. Any number of instances could defederate from mine and I’d be forced to either move again or miss out on content I’m used to. There’s no guarantee user names will be available everywhere, so I find the prospects for community building extremely suspect long term.
Uhm... costs don't rise exponentially, if anything the opposite is true.
The other things you list don't have anything to do with enshitification. They are mostly growing pains of a new piece of software and general problems with federation that we need to solve.
More people, more resources. More people, more moderation. More people, more problems. More time consuming. More admins, more time to make decisions. And so on.
Yea but that's not what exponential growth means. Fix costs stay the same regardless of the number of users an instance has, and the cost per user usually goes down when you scale the capacity. That means the costs still increase of course, but the curve tends to flatten.
I mean in the initial growth phase. Yes it will eventually flatten out, but the way Lemmy is run atm won't likely do that unless it stays small.
Talking about exponential growth in the early phase makes even less sense, because exponential curves actually grow very slowly at the beginning while projects usually start out with substantial initial costs to get things going. And nothing about the way Lemmy is run indicates that it won't flatten out or doesn't flatten out already, I really have no idea why you would think that.
Maybe “snowballs” is a better metaphor. Point is, the way an instance is run today (1 person, maybe a small team dealing with everything) isn’t sustainable through growth without outside money coming in. The counter I keep hearing is to essentially keep that instance small, but number of users isn’t the only problem. More content needing to be processed is. And keeping things small and or having performance problems is not something that will help community building.