this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
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The software's not the problem though. Infrastructure isn't free. You can self-host Lemmy off your own broadband for a while, but as your site grows this'll become infeasible. So then you have to host on someone else's hardware: AWS or whatever, and paying a few 10s or maybe a few 100s of currency per month is fine, but then suddenly you go viral and get clobbered with a bill for 50K.
Plus of course there's the time you need to spend working on the service. It isn't paying, by definition, so not only are you not getting an income from it you're also not able to work at something else which could give you an income. This is fine for rich playboys but not for the rest of us wage slaves.
And so you need an income to sustain the service, and thus the descent into enshittification begins. This will only be solved when we get free infrastructure, but how?
You can flash a pi and have a standalone individual instance. Computing power is growing, scaling grows too. We don't have an option for stuff like AI today, but I could host my own Lemmy instance that only supports my household for $30. Site hugs can still happen but there are still solutions; seeding partitions is one way to resolve that, reposting requires rehosting.