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?
It depends on how… thematic local is.
On programming.dev, local is almost entirely things that are interesting to me. Some I’m less interested about (new version of emacs released), but everything else is stuff I’d possibly read.
If I was more into Star Trek, then startrek.website would be the place to be as everything in local there is Star Trek related.
When you get to a general instance, local is less cohesive and it is more people who picked a server rather than people who picked that server.
This also means that discovery of new content that is likely of interest is more challenging.
Two of the primary concerns for picking a server are ease of content discovery and confidence in server administration.