Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I'm curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don't see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

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[–] ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

This is a common question from newcomers, and it's not necessarily a bad one, just worth being aware of this to better understand some of the responses you may see. Something else to keep in mind is that there is no collective, united Fediverse community in the way that you might sorta see on some bigger tech platforms (albeit even on those, there's not really a singular community either).

What this means is that there's no combined community effort from folks across the Fediverse to attract new users, and since it's all loosely connected communities driving it all, there's no market push to popularize them as you're more apt to see from the tech industry. In fact, if you wander into some parts of the Fediverse, you'll find some folks far happier to keep their communities small and to themselves for a variety of reasons, sometimes conflating the tech and their community (i.e. a popularization of Lemmy as tech wouldn't mean their little Lemmy community instance had to link up with every other one).

That said, there are also plenty of folks around here interested in the question and planning/discussing drawing in more folks. Some of those discussions being about improvements to the technology to make it less jank and comfortable for less technically inclined users, others about how to present it without getting in the weeds of the tech details, and some just by trying to post interesting/entertaining content to keep folks interested past a glance. There's as many ways to approach it as there are Fediverse communities, and so there's not really been any one way that people have been going about it.