The tech giants make enough money that they could keep on growing forever, from my understanding.
But the fediverse? Sure the main instances that get enough funding are going to be okay, but what about the single-user instances 10 years from now on when there’s a lot more content to download? Won’t they go bankrupt just by trying to annex the big instances?
And I have the impression that the lemmy giants are going to change over time: does that mean that 50 years from now on, the posts I’m posting here today might get lost in time because the instances that annex it will have shut down by then?
I probably misunderstand how the fediverse works, but my worry is that the small instances won’t be able to hold an ever-growing amount of data forever.
I spoke in absolutes for the sake of readability, but I’m as in-the-dark as can be.
Why would an instance annex another instance? I can’t imagine the pain in trying to merge two databases like that, then handling the changing of the address.
If anything, I expect a single or a collection of larger instances could choose to defederate from the larger federation.
My bad. By annexing, I meant downloading posts from other instances.
It is basically like when a person goes to a webpage. If anything, it is more likely that a group of smaller instances to take down a big instance hosting tons of communities.