As someone who's new to the fediverse, can you (or others) explain a bit more about how the costs of an instance might affect us? I was pondering this a bit yesterday; at the end of the day, hosting an interactive site at scale can get very expensive.

Specifically:

• how does the fediverse model address costs at scale?
• what happens if an instance closes? How does that affect content hosted there, as well as user accounts registered there?
• I figured joining a large instance would be the best thing to do (more content and engagement), but now I'm wondering if that's at all true. Maybe a smaller instance is less likely to grow so much that costs are a problem, and the fediverse model itself provides the cross instance content?

Gotcha. Thanks for the insight. I'm definitely curious to see how well the "donate to keep the lights on" model works out. It's likely that the people joining right now are passionate and enough are willing to donate, but we'll see if that trend works out. I think it could, with the more specific instances. Probably people are more willing to foot the bill for a topic they are passionate about, rather than for a bigger, more general instance. Anyway, we'll see!

Interesting. I didn't realize that user subscriptions are the connections across instances that drive the content. Is there a good fediverse write up that explains this stuff?

Ah, one follow up question about instances closing: what happens to the content that originates from that instance? Poof? Or does the federation model preserve it somehow?