this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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What is the maximum number of active users on an instance before the financial burden gets too high for the admins? (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Pretty straight question.

I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.

I also know that Lemmy devs said that

lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.

https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503

As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?

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[โ€“] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Besides user count, the number of federated instances, posts, and comments will also increase server costs. Its possible that federating from many instances has a larger performance penalty than having a high user count.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

That's another point. I guess over time some instances would aggregate in clusters. There is probably low interest for a niche software development English speaking instance to federate with a local Japan speaking city instance