This is something I've been trying to figure out on my end. I run a community instance for creators at https://spectra.video, and so far it's been a pretty good situation. The community is fairly cozy, we don't have many problems with spam, and we connect with a handful of really good partner instances that we like and trust.
Here's the thing: my server keeps growing.
In like the last few months, my server's user count has ballooned up to 320 users, from about 50 or so. That's in spite of the fact that I'm incredibly conservative about user registration, and screen just about everyone who registers to cut down on trolls and spam.
Object Storage is sitting at half a terrabyte for video, which in the grand scheme of things is actually not terrible. But, the server is not beefy for constant video transcoding, and setting up infra to make that pain easier is not cheap. At all.
At the end of the day, I'm going to have to think about migrating to a more powerful VPS, to setting up runners on some kind of cloud GPU architecture, to thinking about whether to segment out my database to some kind of externally hosted solution. All of this stuff is expensive, migration is messy, and trying to support all of this seems complicated.
I feel like, within the next few months, we're going to see an influx of YouTube migrations similar to what happened with Reddit and Twitter. I don't think any particular instance can truly be ready for that to happen, but I'd like to at least try to prepare for the worst.
Is anybody else thinking about how to deal with this?