Pretty straight question.
I see Lemm.ee is now the second most populated instance based on https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/list, with 3634 monthly active users.
I also know that Lemmy devs said that
lemmy.ml is bigger than beehaw, and only costs 80 euros per month for a dedicated server.
https://lemmy.ml/comment/2372503
As lemmy.ml has 3561 monthly active users, should we consider that around 3,5k-4k users is the sweet spot for an instance population, and stop recommending the ones that reached that threshold?
Besides user count, the number of federated instances, posts, and comments will also increase server costs. Its possible that federating from many instances has a larger performance penalty than having a high user count.
That’s another point. I guess over time some instances would aggregate in clusters. There is probably low interest for a niche software development English speaking instance to federate with a local Japan speaking city instance