Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
- obviously single user instance have higher costs
Start your own for you. Open registration while keeping an eye on resources. When you hit hardware limits, close registration. Should be easy enough to manage moderation, and resources wouldn’t cost much more than the initial costs of running it just for yourself.
The number of users is not really what drives costs honestly. Or at least, it’s not like a linear relationship. I think actually having many popular communities might be a bigger issue.
On that topic, could limiting the posting of pictures and asking people to use external picture hosts help with that?
Yes, storage costs matters. I think it’s honestly crazy that Lemmy caches images as much as it does. It would be great to be able to just disable it completely, but alas you can’t do that without disabling uploads for your own users either (at least I don’t know how).
Disabling uploads might be an option. You probably just need to announce it to the people beforehand, but I see most of the people using image links from other sites, so that might not be an issue.
It’s a major downside to my own users though. I wish I could disable uploads for everyone else :P
Indeed 😄
Of course it is. More queries = more resources.
Yes, but honestly unless you’re very big, federation queries are the bulk of the processing and stuff from your own instance doesn’t matter that much. I mean think about it, do you think the 100 active users on your own instance is what costs or the 10000 users posting all over the fediverse is what matters? Obviously the latter. So again, local user count is not that impactful.