I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
What about some sort of equity load balancing shenanigans? Small instances take on some load roughly equivalent to what they use from other instances or something. In another comment I was talking about funding instances and being able to rapidly iterate funding methods. One issue is they get value from the federation, so contributing all or some portion of what you use may be fitting.