It feels like this is how social media and the Internet should have been all along. Truly run for the interest and good of humanity, and out of the hands of corporate control and profiteering. People, out of their own generosity and goodwill, host their own instances and let others use it for free. It's such an awesome example of humans helping each other and working to create abundance for everyone to enjoy.
I believe that everyone putting their time, money, and effort into building up the Fediverse - the developers, server owners, mods, and everyone else who keeps it alive and interesting - is helping to make the Internet (and by extension, the world) a better place. You all are awesome. Keep up the amazing work.
Also hi, I'm new here. I found out about Lemmy today, and I was so intrigued that I spent all day learning about it lol.
I'd say they're comparable and have similar problems experienced in different ways.
On mastodon, a big name becomes the stress on the server. It's like people showing up to a small coffee shop to hear a politician speak about something. If the politician becomes more renowned / popular, eventually they have rallies. Eventually those rallies are broadcasted and licestreamed... All that means more infra and more $
Lemmy has the problem of communities. Communities sometimes gather in small places like a person's house or a bar. If that community grows large, maybe they need to have a conference / convention (like an anime or tech community). That means the instance that hosts that community has to has a conference sized instance, to host all the lads/lasses/etc of the fediverse.
More eyeballs / more discussion = more demand. Simple as that.
edit: I will add that there is one difference. You might have your own little small fragmented community, here on sh.itjust ... like for skateboards. More intimate discussion, etc. This would potentially prevent c/skateboards on an instance from growing too large....
But there is only one @gargron that most people will follow.