Something I noticed a lot is that while the whole promise if the fediverse is decentralization, it’s not sustainable and very centralized at most.
In the last months I opened multiple accounts to use multiple fediverse services(Mastodon, Pleroma, Lemmy,… etc) and I chooses non-mainstream servers to test the decentralization of the fediverse.
Most of the servers that I opened account in to use got shutdown by the servers owners due to a lot of reasons( literally every server that got shutdown has it’s own specific reason, from financials to ideology and software).
From what I can see currently at least, the best approach to social media sites are either complete P2P(which comes with it’s own disadvantages, but it has a strong advantages to consider) or one centralized server.
What will happen to your instance users if you decided to shutdown for whatever reason?
Users who want to join the fediverse right now are faced with 2 choices:
If the user chooses this option then he/she has to void the decentralization feature of the fediverse, which defeats the purpose of the whole thing.
If the user chooses this option, then he/she (from what I witnessed by myself and seen) will have to create a new account every 3-6 months.
All that and I did not speak about the whole security and privacy issues associated with using the fediverse.
As I said before in my humble opinion I think that the superior options here are:
I’m a member of an old school forum that has been running for 15 years. What is the difference with a Lemmy instance?
I don’t want to sound like a d*#k but, ask the admins who shutdown their servers.
The fediverse is P2P. You can host an instance only for yourself. Just like email.
Non Profit centralized will not solve your problem because they can still fail or you can get banned if you do something stupid.