eh, just lurk. Look, don't stress it. There's no business model here. We don't need growth. It's nice, it's cool, it makes it all worthwhile, but somewhere a greybeard sysadmin (sup Ruud) is running a server for the fuckin lols at his own expense and THAT is the fediverse. It's just all those people chained together, and we need to spread that load across as many people as possible.

This Fediverse thing does NOT require, but it does accept that someday you might want to bite some hosting fees and do your own little part, just one more instance, one more server, picking up your load and that of a few of your friends. If somebody is hosting an open server, they're already okay with you freeloading, so freeload to your heart's content.

For every one person who is willing to nerd down and host something, we need like 100 people or more to fuck around in the thing being hosted and make it worth doing. It's all set up so that if the person who is paying to host gets exhausted, well, those 100 people aren't screwed. It's set up so hosters can drop in and out at will. The Fediverse expects and plans for the person who is hosting your nonsense on their own dime to say fuck this, and drop out, and yet you have a setup that leaves you whole, you might not even notice. You can at least migrate elsewhere with minimum friction.

Just engage with shit. Updoot it or whatever. Fuck around and be here. Login and poke around. None of us will see it but the person hosting the instance (waddup Ruud) will see it, and that's enough. Your engagement is not the difference between life or death. An exponential growth in users is a requirement for commercial socials to thrive but here? That just makes it more expensive for your gracious host to host you. If another 50,000 people show up tomorrow that will probably kill the whole damn thing, it's why Beehaw is having problems, they were planning on 200 users a month and got 3000 because Reddit.

This whole Fediverse thing is what is left of the Old Way, where places to be online existed because some normal person wanted to put up a server for a forum or whatever and it was running out of a box in their bathroom.

The good news is that all those people are pushing 50 now, they have spouses and children, they aren't crazy people. The deranged bastards who ran a box in the bathroom like they were the Emperor of Fuck Town have all died from probably substance abuse and what is left is sane people running servers out of their bathroom (for cooling purposes) on a remarkably high level because that's their job. They run servers for like, Amazon Web Services or some shit, so running a Fediverse instance is child's play. That is what you're enjoying right now.

Or they've paid cloud hosting fees so that even though they have no idea what the fuck they're doing some greybeard sysadmin is handling every thing that matters. That's the situation. That's why this clown show runs a lot better than it should.

So don't stress lurking. If you were a lurker on Reddit, lurk here. Just hang. We already have a Shitposting subLemmy or whatever, so go post shit, or don't. Don't worry about it. If you don't personally contribute to the exponential growth needed for a commercial social to thrive, nothing bad will happen. You could be here for a year just lurking and then get inspired to post your ass off, that works too. You got options.

Don't worry about working for it. It's not necessary. Welcome to nonprofit social media.