Its now running on a dedicated server with 6 cores/12 threads and 32 gb ram. I hope this will be enough for the near future. Nevertheless, new users should still prefer to signup on other instances.
This server is financed from donations to the Lemmy project. If you want to support it, please consider donating.
Thank you for your hard work! Although I kinda foresee for the future if Lemmy really would become the new “reddit” with such servers and millions of users, wouldn’t that also rise the server costs and ultimately make the hosts dependent on asking money for it, maybe by a paywall or by ads? I think to make this community really be “free” without any host responsible for spending a huge amount of money for servers, the best solution would be to make the actual “servers” be a p2p cluster. Unfortunately I’m not quite sure how to realize that without losing a huge fraction of the model if a lot of nodes (i.e., the actual users) are offline. Sorry, I’m just brainstorming.
I would love a social network powered by the users that are using it. Maybe also running something like serverless functions on the client devices.
You might want to check the Earthstar project: https://earthstar-project.org/ They are working on that. Right now, it’s super early; they are building the foundations. Peer-to-peer is unfortunately much more difficult to code then servers, because less people have built the building-blocks required, and because mobile phones are actively making it hard to run peer-to-peer apps.