I grew up at this time and never heard of XMPP. Most kids I know used AIM or MSN, which eventually got replaced by a combination of Myspace/Facebook/Skype and SMS on our cell phones (especially when mobile plans started commonly offering unlimited talk and text plans). I feel like those products became far more of a blow to services like jabber than google talk who I don't remember anyone really using. I could be wrong though
I'm not a lemmy.world user (so I have no dog in this debate) but I'm gonna disagree. I'm of the opinion that signups for an instance should stay open as long as the admins can afford/handle the growth. I think it's unfair to force the admins to keep it open if they aren't able to handle it which is the crux of what OP is asking.
Besides, it's not like those users cant just federate with all the communities of lemmy.world they want. And I bet there won't be a dearth of choices for decent instances if the demand calls for it. Lemmy.ml closed signups despite being the big instance and lemmy.world emerged as an alternative. So why wouldn't something similar happen if lemmy.world did the same?
I played this on DS in college about a decade ago. To this day it's one of the very few JRPGs that I feel absolutely nailed the pacing. Every other JRPG, as much as I enjoy the genre overall can really drag in that department and start feeling tedious at certain points in the game.
Been here for a couple weeks, I've enjoyed it so far. Some niche communities are missing but I think Lemmy is a good time and I love the vision
I think while Mastodon and Lemmy don't solve those issues particularly well at the moment I'm still confident they are solvable problems.
As for costs, I don't think it'll be that bad. It's not nearly as expensive if you're just trying to cover expenses (and not focused entirely on growth and revenue), and if a server does get to a point where the admins are concerned about donations keeping up they can cut off sign ups. Push incoming users to other instances that can handle the extra load (or spin up new ones if no more remain). It won't be the cleanest process and the inconvenience will make it tough to capture a lot of the potential incoming growth but Lemmy doesn't need to chase that growth entirely. It can grow at its own pace and handle what it can handle.
My friend mentioned Reddit is Fun is shut down now. Sad day 😔
Man I really wish he/she would make an app for Lemmy. I heard the dev was going to build one for Tildes but I don't know Tildes just isn't the same and I have an account there.