I know donations are an option, but I don’t think long term donations will be sustainable. Most users will never donate. I don’t think that they are not sustainable. If everything works out to be a properly federated network that is made up out of a lot of small to medium sized instances I think that it would be sustainable. Hosting costs should actually not be too expensive. You don’t end up with millions of users on a single instance causing it to have massive load. And users are generally more willing to contribute financially if they get the feeling of using a platform that reflects their values and is run with their interest in mind.

You can do that as soon as your instance knows about that community.

I mean yeah sure. Physical distance will affect latency negatively and this leads to increased times for establishing connections and can also affect the available bandwidth negatively. Still with todays connections it’s not an issue for me to download with a couple of hundred megabit from a server on the other side of the world. So I doubt that it would have a very noticable effect on the user experience. There are far more important factors like how much load a server has and what hardware a server is running on.

oh that’s great

I do agree with that. This is definitely a barrier of entry. But you can’t really completely get rid of it without taking away what makes lemmy what it is: A federated network and it’s integral to what it is trying to acheive.

What I do believe you can do is mitigate it. “Default servers” could be part of that. Again I can only advocate for regional servers. In the bigger countries you can make that based on a 1 default server per state or region/province level. In smaller countries even one instance per country might be enough. People would automatically be on an instance that is uses their native language. You could also kinda slowly introduce them to the idea of federation like that: “This is the instance for your country. But you can also explore other countries and interact with their people”.

Somebody could create a landing page to automatically pick an instance for a user based on what language their system is set to and their IP adress. A German user goes to the website and gets to pick the state they live in. They are getting suggested a server that correlates to whatever state they picked.

Obviously for now it would be overkill to create an instance for every single state. But hopefully we will get there.

I personally belief that regional instances are the way to go.

And at some point we also gotta think about how to organize the instances…legally, financially and technically. For now I’m really happy at how the instance I’m on is run. But to be fair. I have no clue who is running it. I have no clue wether I’m going to agree with future decisions. I don’t even know if it will be around next week. Maybe the owner just decides he has more important things in life to do (which is fair tbh).

The model that lemmy is based on gives us all the tools to organize instances however we want to. I really want to see community owned instances. Here in Germany social non profit clubs are a thing. You can officially register them and there are laws, regulations that protect them from just being taken over. They have boards that get elected by the members on a regular basis. I think that could be a great model on how to run an instance that is truly owned by its members.

I’m sure there are similar models of organization in other countries too.

That is exactly the kind of shit I came here for!

How do you check wether nsfw content is allowed?

Because my instance (feddit.de) doesn‘t allow pornographic material. I guess that doesn‘t exclude all nsfw content. But the column header is called adult and it makes it seem like „adult content“ aka porn was allowed.

*edit fixed typo