Right, any way you slice it, if you have a reddit-scale operation where the content is served entirely by the instances, then the people who run the instances are paying a reddit-scale hosting bill in aggregate. I saw one estimate that Reddit paid about half a million dollars in hosting bills per month. You hit the nail on the head – adding a hobbyist who’s running their own instance for themselves and maybe a handful of people, does nothing to reduce the load on the big instances. How many of those big instances are there going to be if Lemmy grows to reddit size? Enough to break that half-million dollar aggregate hosting bill into manageable pieces? Probably not. At that point you can’t do it just with hobbyists with their home machines on static IPs anymore.

Or, actually, you can, if you architect the system to make proper use of the hobbyists’ hardware. Obviously there are solutions; what I’m envisioning is a browser plugin that enables someone browsing Lemmy to pull content from the hobbyists even when talking to the big instances (basically decouple “I run an instance” from “I have to pay all the hosting costs for every byte that’s served to someone browsing on that instance” and shift some of the load onto the people who are more in a hobbyist role and aren’t paying for any kind of official hosting but can still send bytes). I have a lot more thoughts on the topic and more full ideas about how it might be solved, I was just trying to get a sense of what the community’s thoughts on it are also.