I get the idea of instances, like you can make your own and this is good for privacy. But some lemmy instances are much more popular and this in fact makes it another Reddit. If there are separate instances for niche topics, why not make it another community inside a larger instance?
Part of it is figuring out how to pay for all the servers. If we have 1000 instances instead of 100, more people pay a smaller amount for server maintenance. If everyone uses a single instance, who pays for it?
That’s especially a problem since people absolutely don’t want to see ads, they don’t like the idea of a coin/reward system, and generally don’t contribute (less than 1 out of 20 ppl donate, and that’s being generous)
For what it’s worth, once you get to the single user level, the cost is pretty much nil assuming you have the hardware and domain already
Nice! I have neither; how much’ll it run me?
Well you can get a domain with a weird TLD for $2-5 a year and $40-80 once for a SBC like a raspberry pi to run it. Ideally you’d want a small 32-64gb ~$20 SSD or HDD for storage, but in a pinch a USB stick or micro SD card that you can get for ~$5 would do. Any old computer can handle it though, Lemmy is pretty lightweight, you would have resources left over on the host to run other services. So in total if you wind up in over $100 something went wrong somewhere.