My wording was poor. I ment that currently there is no way to contribute to reducing stress on an instance. Making your own instance might help prevent the problem from getting worse, but it is not the same as adding more cpu power or ram to an instance. If a instance is maxing out on it’s CPU power, currently there is no way to allow other people to help disperse the current load.

On a slightly tangential point, I am not sure how sustainable it is to increase the number of possible users by increasing the number of instances. It is already a frustrating process finding the right instance to join. So imagine when there is 1 instance for every 100 users. With 100k users that is 1000 different instances to sort through. I think there needs to be better ways to scale Lemmy, especially the amount processing power it requires. Lemmy.ml will only be able to scale so big on a single vps instance, or even physical server.

I have been thinking about this a bit. Right now there is not really a way to spread the load out like you mentioned. Anyone can make another instance, but it doesn’t really alleviate any of the stress from another instance. I think it might even add to it, although not as much as adding a bunch of new users would. It would be beneficial to be able to contribute compute power to an instance, but I don’t think that is a realistic goal with the way Lemmy is setup.

I agree. I found it easier to transition because I follow mostly smaller tech subreddits that already had a presence here, or quickly started one. I only posted 70 comments total and almost nothing recently. I am more concerned about the power users, mods, and people who need things like screen readers not being able to make the jump. In my opinion Lemmy needs those users more than lurkers.

Honestly I think the AMA showed that they are not backing down. Spez answered like 14 total questions on an AMA with 30k comments the last I checked. They don’t seem to care, and I don’t see there being a significant number of people actually leaving reddit either, the alternatives just don’t fix the problems people are having with reddit. If you use a 3rd party app because it has more features, are you going to leave the platform for another platform that only has one 3rd party app?

Yeah I have been thinking about how to approach this issue. I don’t have the kind of money to pay for a large instance to be hosted in the cloud. I am curious about the feasibility of hosting Lemmy on a physical server. The hard part being protecting the server from ddos, and other attacks.

Edit: I forgot about things like up time as well. Maintenance, internet outages, ect could all affect users on an instance, especially if there is no redundancy in the servers.

If the selfhosted community decides to create an instance, I think it would be cool to host a bunch of selfhosted communities. For example you would have the instance at example.selfhosted, then a selfhosted community, and also other communities that use selfhosted software. So example.selfhosted would have communities: selfhosted, plex, jellyfin, vaultwarden, ect.

As for leaving lemmy.ml I vote to wait a bit. I don’t think there is a easy/good way to move instances at the moment. So in effect you would be abandoning this community and starting over on a different instance. Although I might be wrong about that.