My main concern with this is, if only a handful of centralized social network reached long term stability, and most of them are unprofitable, how can Lemmy (or any other foss fediverse project) completely hold itself on 2 unpaid developers and immense unpaid work from volunteers in the long run.

Because ok, Lemmy.world is looking for experienced sysadmin and that post already had a little backslash, but this isn't sustainable long term, it's impossibile to keep scaling like that.

And I feel that's one of the biggest reasons holding back the fediverse

[–] lutillian@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

From the 2 developers and The volunteers... The same can be asked about a lot of foss software. Typically what stabilizes foss development though is when developers start getting paid to contribute to the project by a company they work for, however lots of foss software has made it purely through donations (easiest example being mediawiki and wikipedia)

Web hosting is definitely the harder question. In the grand scheme of things, lemmy instances and other fediverse tech will likely end up being pseudo-centralized with a handful of companies like email. Lemmy is very resource intensive as you guessed. The good news is that a very large amount of that resource consumption is storage, and storage is cheap. Though I know I've seen tehdude, the owner of the sh.itjust.works instance, another very stable one, comment on how CPU, networking and memory intensive a busy instance can get. A lot of the early 500s instances were seeing were definitely caused by resource constraints.