I’m fairly new and don’t 100% understand it yet, but instances are run on servers that require money. Are we heading towards seeing ads or subscriptions to raise funds instead of relying on donations to cover overhead?
Especially with the influx of new users. Hardware upgrades are needed.
I recently experienced this while building an upgrade for my 3D printer. The upgrade kit included a touchscreen. I found out later that the touchscreen was effectively its own separate computer with more than 10x more resources than the actual computer inside the 3D printer that was doing the most important calculations.
The compute and memory resource constraints were basically nonexistent factors in the design of the printer and the upgrade kit. Merely, a simpler computer was easier to design for and characterize, so the printer itself had a very simple computer, and for the UX, a “beefy” computer was much easier to program. It’s bizarre seeing how little the amount of computer resources mattered. It might as well have been free.