There are "questions about sex" and there are "men/women of reddit/lemmy, what's the sexiest sex you ever sexed" being repeated every other day like on r/askreddit. I assume nobody would reject the occasional insightful sex questions.
I believe, with Authorized Fetch (what Mastodon calls secure mode) blocking intermediaries won't be needed, as instances will have to cryptographically "authorize" themselves to receive/send data, and you can just say "no" to any requests coming from threads.net, acting basically as a "defederation enforcement mode".
I could be wrong though, haven't caught up on the exact details.
That's the eventual goal.
Or, well, something like it.
respect to our hard workers, tirelessly working the content mines, all for nothing but a handful of up votes
Microservices aren't a silver bullet. There's likely quite a lot that can be done until we need to split some parts out, and once that happens I expect that federation would be the thing to split out as that's one of the more "active" parts of the app compared to logins and whatnot.
The instance I'm replying from is a 5 eur/mo box from Hetzner.
Your main concerns are gonna be active user count & storage space. Especially if you decide to allow image or god forbid video uploads. Having a bunch of inactive users aren't going to affect costs that much as long as they don't have, like, a milion subscriptions. (If they're all subscribed to the same community things will "deduplicate")
It's generally more like "Steve's 10 eur/mo cloud server in which they run ten other things next to Lemmy, which is written by two devs and barely held together by duct tape and prayers"
But that doesn't change the overall point.
With how unreliable tallying votes over federation is, we're kinda get vote fuzzing "for free" right now.
...so create your community on that instance. Others will still be able to access it just like you're accessing communities elsewhere.
Some instances disallow community creation. That's the only part where this argument has any merit. Otherwise which instance a community is on doesn't really matter.
Any admin worth their salt's gonna defederate them and proudly wear the Misfit Loser Zealot label[^1]. The only people who'll federate with them are the naive techbros and those who only care about how much users they have, compared to, idk, being committed to creating a good community.
https://fedipact.online is already gaining steam with the Mastodon side of the fediverse.
[^1]: Seriously the markdown guy couldn't've picked a better description if he tried.
If this comment is federating then I started hosting my first service -- Lemmy itself.
So was 0.18.0. In fact I think the next few releases will all be like this.
(just cheekily testing to make sure federation didn't break between updates)