I would love to know why we’re seeing such a decline. My guess is the costs of running a service and the time it takes to manage the instance. As instance operators see increased costs for bandwidth, image storage, etc… but without any real form of revenue to offset those costs, I think we’re going to see only the truly dedicated operators continue to run the system the way it’s needed.

I’ve seen quite a few discussions already where users are saying as soon as they see an ad, they immediately delete their account and move.. which is their own prerogative. However, outside of donations and potential begging for people to contribute, there really isn’t a business model to be had here.

I’ll continue to research methods to keep server and hosting costs down, but it’s something that we all (public instance operators) need to think about.

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 2 hours ago

If Wikipedia can stay afloat off of donations I'm sure lemmy instances can too as long as they're providing something people want.

[–] Blaze@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 5 hours ago (2 children)

It's probably people starting instances as a small side project without making them public and shutting them dowb after a while

For costs, you can have a look at this post; https://feddit.org/post/2600584

[–] mesamunefire@piefed.social 4 points 3 hours ago

Yep that's me!

I love lemmy.world but just that instance slammed my small server to the point it looked closer to a ddos. I eventually just went to rss instead.

[–] bigDottee@geekroom.tech 5 points 4 hours ago

Yeah that makes sense. I'm hoping it's just that people have started personal, single-user instances and shut them down and not a larger set of instances going down. I would hope that we would hear more about instances shutting down if that was the case.

After reading through your post for costs, it seems that overall, costs are relatively low, unless the admin/team determine they want to increase the resources or implement additional setups for any reason.