Well, lemmy isn't reddit, if one instance is down/closed then there's a thousand other ones where you can go. So there's no one big server that be overloaded from api calls - more like a million of them sharing the load.
As far as funding goes, each instance would decide on there own, but in the end most of them would settle for a patreon page or something similar.
Developer here. I've been looking at the API calls made by the app, and I'll try to give a good example of what is going on:
To be honest, you're probably not going to see a drastic change in API calls right now. The only things that you are calling the API for are:
This is about the same use that you're going to see in the actual web version.
While there may be upsides and downsides to how they are doing it right now, you can get pretty much all of the info you need through one API call. For example, if I get a post, the response will include most of the user info, most of the community info, and obviously all of the post info, plus more. I don't need to make separate calls to retrieve all of that data.
Same goes for user info. In just one call, I can retrieve all of the information as far as subscriptions, moderated communities, user settings, and more without having to make a separate call for each one.
The issue is going to be mainly just the influx of traffic in general, not the apps themselves from what I can tell.
I'm also including the app's name in the user agent so that if something were to ever become a problem, anyone can reach out and discuss what they are seeing so that it can be corrected.
Edit: I think one of the biggest issues that larger instances may run into is data usage. Nearly all photos that get posted to Lemmy are hosted on particular instances instead of services like Imgur. There's ups and down to both, but in the short term I can see this possibly as being an issue if instances are not being ran on providers who are lenient or provide their data at low costs.
I was chatting with someone about this earlier today. It would be great if there was a fan-out system something like icecast crossed with bittorrent, so people could contribute VPS or home internet to propagate Lemmy traffic. That would require some crypto signatures in the protocol to make sure the messages weren't tampered with, of course.
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