A thought prompted by seeing instances growing and struggling to have enough resources. Then and now, people in groups trying to communicate something. Hardware became incredibly faster over decades, storage became incredibly more huge, and software bloat kept pace?
well, you can use google groups web interface but that sucks. there is also the eternal september free text access. for premium access blocknews has 5 gigs for 2 bucks which will last forever if you are just reading text groups. 2 bucks (or the free options) are a lot less than what the server would cost to run a lemmy instance.
Yes, but google is paying for the newsfeed. You don’t have to pay to access the fediverse.