No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
As of now, it's all up to those who volunteered to host these open/large instances. They can accept donations but if they decide to shut down an instance, it's gone. In the future I feel being able to gracefully handle instances disappearing would be the best bet. Financial reasons aren't the only reason this could happen. Too many users could in theory break instances, as you can only scale vertically so much and at the moment I haven't seen any talk of successful horizontal scaling. If users of an abandoned/deleted instance could easily move to another with minimal data loss this would mitigate this issue.
For long term viability, my opinion is legal entities (corporations, non-profits, etc) should be setup to handle larger instances that arise. They'll operate as non-profits do, taking donations and hiring people to do the work that needs to be done. Expecting lone sysadmins to handle large user bases without some legal status/protection is a recipe for disaster. This also gives these larger instances a better standing to work within the current systems that will start asking questions/regulating if things get too big.
As for bringing in new users, these apps will have to make the process easier. It's up to these apps to educate people or link to materials to educate people on the fediverse. These apps should be made to try and move users to instances that have the capacity to handle it and offer options. Yes, some users might find the fediverse and instances overwhelming but this is a common story with new things. Expecting everything to conform to how users currently operate is more for business interests, where user growth is a requirement for increased earnings and friction is bad.
The main concern with centralizing is once you have lemmy instances become centralized you arrive at the same position as reddit. What's to say the largest lemmy instances won't hold their instance hostage? Sell it to a corporation who liquidates it for the data and sees running the instance as a loss? Start defederating or limiting federation with other instances with malicious motives? If there is dozens of these larger instances, this will be easier to mitigate than the current handful of instances. It's best if things are more decentralized, this is the goal of the fediverse after all.
Overall, lemmy isn't ready for mass adoption as it stands. More work will need to be done and yes this is in "the future". The current user base spiking doesn't change the fact the code isn't there, nor the fact code takes time. At the moment, you either suffocate instances by becoming too popular (lemmy.ml) or adapt and help contribute to get to the point where a large user base can be handled (such as mastodon has done).
This is definitely a valid concern but it's not a problem right now! With the user numbers currently, it's not monetizable. There are a few large instances poised to take up the load so even if one instance sold out, the rest would carry on!