I chose lemmy.ml based on two things:
- I wanted a server that wasn’t likely to close I don’t really know for sure, but I imagine it’s easy to underestimate how much money or time is required to run a server. And I’d really prefer not having to worry about migrating. The ‘run by Lemmy’s developers’ part makes me think that either the risk will be lower or the people running the server will know how to prevent reaching a point like that.
- I didn’t want to join a very specific instance As I see it, there are two possible scenarios:
- The instance I join will affect the content I’m exposed (and not exposed) to, in which case I want to experience ‘the whole internet’ rather than a section of it.
- The instance I choose is irrelevant to the content I get, in which case, (apart from community rules) it shouldn’t really matter which one I choose, so I would just join the biggest instance.
Still something that could help with the choosing-an-instance process is to display in the list of servers the community rules and if they are blocking certain communities.
I don’t think a server is bound to close because of being small or big necessarily, but I think that the average person is more likely to overestimate their capacity to run a server for a lot of people. I’m no expert, but I imagine the cost a reddit-like server that is open to the public can only go up over time. Unless you delete content periodically on purpose, and especially if you allow users to post images, audio or video.
I can picture someone (understandably) creating a server with good intentions and then after 2 months saying “guys, I didn’t think it would cost this much. And I also need to focus more on work/university so the server will close. You have 3 days to move.”
It’s not like I trust that the developers will have infinite resources, but that they will know what to do to avoid something like that or even take other measures if they know they are reaching a limit. For example, limiting the amount of people that join while they upgrade the servers may be one way to do that (although I don’t know if that’s what they are doing).
As for the server running smoothly, I had a couple of small issues in the little time I’ve been trying to use lemmy, but I assumed they were because of the whole project still being in development rather than a server problem.