Admin of vmst.io suddenly announced the instance was shutting down in 2 weeks. The instance was well-run, and better-funded than most, but the admin claimed that they were still subsidizing operations, which is certainly likely. However, they didn’t ask for additional contributions and didn’t explain why they needed to shut down the instance with such short notice.
But they also have apparently moved their main personal social media presence to Bluesky 😑 Reading a little between the lines of the thread where they announced the reasons for the shutdown, I’d say the root cause was they gave up on the Fediverse.
Fedi isn’t going to ever be a mainstream platform, and a key learning here is that instances cannot be dependent on individuals if the idea is ever going to gain more traction. Instances should be run by non-profit groups with a clear funding model, ideally self-sustaining via a trust/endowment or similar structure. Governance similarly needs to be distributed so that administration isn’t a burden on one person and so legal exposure is isolated from individuals.
My feeling is that a group of a dozen core instances that match that description would provide a solid nucleus for the larger constellation of smaller or individual instances across the Fediverse.
#fediverse #FediAdmin #socialmedia #decentralized
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