I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
Of course, but the important part is you have choice and instances will keep each other in check because you can always switch. With a centralized system like Reddit there’s only one provider and if you don’t use them you’re locked out of the system entirely. This gives them a monopoly on the platform and the power to do anti user bullshit.
Email is also a protocol with distributed servers and compared to that I think each fediverse instance has far less lock in. With email I can switch providers but it’s a big hassle to have to change all my accounts and tell people to use the new address and set up forwarding etc. With my Lemmy account I don’t really care that much about my user history since it’s all anonymous anyways and it’s not connected to anything that’s central to my life so if I have to switch instances it’s not a big deal. It would be nice to have some kind of account linking to show that the different instance accounts belong to the same person, and that should definitely be possible to implement, but honestly it’s not even that big of a deal to me.