I’m nearly of a mind to start a couple of Lemmy instances and front them with a load balancer–I have the resources and technical ability to build a Lemmy instance for scale–but I have zero interest in moderating the thing. I don’t want to deal with the headache of everything that goes along with that, and don’t want any responsibility for the users or content.
Would anyone be interested in a ‘Lemmy Infra as-a-Service,’ where I keep things running but hand off the management keys to you?
I’ve already put in the self hosting effort and honestly I think for anyone who knows what that means, the setup process is much easier than getting moderation right.
However, I have seen several posts about people worried that their accounts might disappear when the server disappears. I think there’s a market for Lenny as a Service/Kbin as a Service. You’d need to market it as something like “your social network under your control” or whatever because “instance” means very little to most people.
Setting up your LaaS/Kaas business may be tricky, though, because you need to figure out how much people are willing to pay (which isn’t much) while also being prepared for sudden scaling challenges when Reddit sheds users again. Luckily Lemmy seems to be very efficient with its resources so you can probably host five or ten instances on a cheap server without trouble (especially if you share the database).