redditrefugee here
So, Lemmy.world is just one instance of lemmy… it maybe the biggest one, but its just one right? And it agrees to federate with other lemmy instances (like lemmy.ml)… got it. But at the end of the day, each instance is running on someones computer right? Whats the traffic like between these two? If I ran an instance, and federated with this site, what would that cost me? How much traffic does this instance produce?
Are we suppose to divide into our own instances to reduce costs, and then link them together through lemmy.world? wouldn’t that make it centralized? And then who is paying for THIS? How much is being a central hub between instances going to cost?
Sooner or later, we have to realize that these wonderful free things are usually a bubble that eventually pops when they have to start running ads.
Who is paying for this?
Just like the old world internet, whoever owns (or rents) the server and pays for the connection pays for it. The frontpage has a “Donations” section that lists an OpenCollective link and a Patreon link if you want to send money to the operator. It’s https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld which sounds like they also run a Mastodon instance.
I don’t know the traffic questions, hopefully someone that does comes by or looks it up. It probably varies a lot. You could run your own private instance that would go out and fetch the content you subscribed to but no one else could join. Your comments would go out to the federated instances to be shared if you so choose.
There is no central place. As I understand it if Lemmy.world or Beehaw is destroyed permanently, all those users and and the content is gone but every other instance that shared those communities (the common ones, like this) they will still exist just without the content coming from the disappeared instances.
I’ll look around for an explainer vid because now I’m curious, I doubt most of my guesses are right
This is pretty much the way I understand it. Federated services are a network, not a monolith. Like the Internet (email, ftp, web, etc) and not like Facebook. If you’re into virtual worlds, the fediverse is like the OpenSimulator hypergrid and not like Second Life.
Your guesses are right :)