That is orthogonal to the issue. Historically, only around 2% of the users donate, and the overwhelming majority thinks that donations should be only to cover the costs of hosting+hardware. What OP is showing is that the real cost that goes unpaid is the labor of the admins and moderators.
Do you really think your comment is as valuable of a contribution as those made by the ones running the servers and ensuring that the place is not run over by trolls and spammers?
Are you seriously that entitled to someone else’s time and work?
Ok let me say it in a better way. People who work in IT do it because they like it. Many of the first world wide web pages or YouTube videos were made without anyone wanting any money for it. There was no profit motive or expectation whatsoever.
That’s why I thought it was funny to read how instance owners are doing labor without getting paid, as if that was the purpose of the instance. To get paid for running it.
To me that’s funny. It’s a bit like me painting a painting and putting it out there, and asking people to pay for my labor. The hours I spent making it. Because now the painting exists in the world. Who is gonna pay for it?
I believe instance admins are more than happy running the instance without profit motive. Because it’s nice to be part of giving something to a community of people.
In the grand scheme of things, community members are individually easier to replace than those keeping the service running. E.g, take any community with more than a few hundred users and lose half of them, randomly. Now, take half of the instance admins. More likely than not, the instance will simply stop existing.
maybe small instances, ran by volunteers for the community is a viable concept.
We are talking about different things. Very different things.
I am not saying that small communities are not viable. I am saying that without substantial financial support, all we are going to get is small communities, and we are not going to be able to compete with the corporate mainstream.
If your ambition is just to keep some obscure corner of the internet, fine. If you want to take back the internet away from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Reddit, then we need to get a lot more help than just a dozen people pitching in to cover server bills. It will require work. It will require coordination. It will require resilience. It will require sacrifices.
Being upset at Zuckerberg, or making campaigns to “Boycott Threads” is not going to do anything if our side is orders of magnitude smaller than theirs. They will still be exploiting their users. And even if you personally don’t use it, or your “community” doesn’t use it, there are still plenty of people that I care about that do.
You are definitely not speaking for the billions of people that are still in the large networks. Do you think they prefer to use Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok because it’s somehow better, or because of network effects?
No. Being able to move is an advantage compared to centralized platforms, but it is not the “point” of it. It makes the system overall more robust, but it doesn’t guarantee or protect the individuals that are part of it.
Do you think that the world wide web would reach the size that it has today if websites had such a short shelf-life? Of course not. It would remain just a geeky curiosity, just like Lemmy or Mastodon. There is a reason why Bluesky is adding one million users per week while we are here counting the same dozen of active people since summer 2023. People generally do not care about how the system works, they just want to something that helps them achieve their goals or solves their problems.
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
The main reason it’s much more successful than Mastodon is content discoverability
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Meanwhile, the Mastodon devs are all sharing the belief that they are saints who are working “for the community”. Sorry, it’s not enough. We are not going to amount to much if our ambitions are that low.
And the problem Reddit and Lemmy solve is becoming a niche issue
It doesn’t matter the format. This is not (specifically) about Reddit, or Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok.
This is a discussion about a model that can keep sustainable development and operations of an open web. ActivityPub as whole allows us to think in much broader terms than “replacing Reddit” or "replacing Youtube. The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven’t reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on “high profile” posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it’s as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We’ll never know.
The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.
At the end, that’s an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don’t care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.
You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way?
And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.
Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don’t want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is “expensive”, and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don’t see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what “teenagers” will or will not do.
Why is that “every teenager” is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc… but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
It doesn’t have to be between the two extremes of “free, but you get your data exploited” and “user pays everything”. Alternative business models will show up. Brave’s model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services (“Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!” “iCloud now supports ActivityPub”) is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.
I don’t really see how to solve this issue.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn’t get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on “community” alone.
Hosting video is not the expensive part. It’s the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.
Then why isn’t PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?
Your behavior is not determined by what “teenagers” will or will not do.
Why are you attacking me personally? Is it supposed to convince me to pay 29$/year for your service? If yes, sorry to say, but that’s not very effective, and I will keep donating to other instances like lemmy.zip, feddit.org or sopuli.xyz
Why is that “every teenager” is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc… but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.
Steam has no subscription, what do you mean?
Spotify and Netflix are usually used in a family bundle because their parents find it convenient. But with the rising prices of streaming services, I see more and more people cancelling them and pirating content.
But we didn’t get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on “community” alone.
Did we get there because every Linux user paid a subscription to use the operating system?
Then why isn’t PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?
Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.
Why are you attacking me personally?
It’s not an attack, but it is curious that you feel it is. I am using you as an example because you are one of the most active users here, you are frequently found promoting the Fediverse as an alternative, yet you don’t find it important to support the people that are working to keep the whole thing running.
I am using you as an example to show this common behavior here of people complaining about the state of the social media and exploitative companies, while at the same time exploiting the goodwill of the dozen people who are volunteering their time and money to put up this alternatives.
It’s pure hypocrisy. I don’t care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.
If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.
Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.
Content creators get paid via Patreon. There are several channels who use that way to sustain themselves. Patreon is a donation-based model, not a subscription.
It’s not an attack
It is, especially with the bold emphasis on “You”. You saying it’s not doesn’t deny that fact.
It’s pure hypocrisy. I don’t care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.
According to you. The day other admins will tell us that they can’t make the projects live anymore without additional donations, we can discuss this again. In the meantime, there is no indication that your statement is correct.
Only those who are completely financially illiterate would fall for such a ridiculous proposition.
There is no free lunch, but in Facebook/Reddit/Twitter case they sell ads and user data to make money. And the vast majority of the population seems okay with that.
The point is that we got there by having professionals being paid to work on it.
Professionals who got paid because they were delivering a product or a service to companies.
Which company is going to pay to get more features or a professional version of Lemmy or Piefed?
Lemmy is for personal use, not corporate, and that’s the main difference with Linux or Firefox. It is closer to something like gnucash.org than to a Linux distribution.
The GnuCash Project is a volunteer-driven organization, meaning it depends on volunteers such as you to survive and grow. This page explains different ways to contribute to the project.
To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.
And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.
It is closer to something like gnucash.org than to a Linux distribution.
Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.
So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don’t have to.
To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.
And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.
Indeed, so how would you plan to move enough people to PeerTube for this to change? As long as Youtube is a viable product, there is no real space for any other video website.
Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.
Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple’s business for personal computers?
So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don’t have to.
Could you show me an example in the tech/dev/opensource space where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”? Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.
Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple’s business for personal computers?
Yes! Android is Linux based and dominates market share worldwide.
For desktop, Linux has 4-5% of usage share worldwide, going up to 13% in India. If you include ChromeOS (which is also Linux based) the figures get close to 10% worldwide. Also, the fact that companies like Dell and HP have Linux offerings available give them bargaining power against Microsoft, which certainly counts as “creating a dent on their business”.
Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.
It’s not “human nature”. It’s a cultural issue. High-trust societies (e.g, the Japanese) are a lot more inclined to support the commons even when not directly required to do so. Low-trust, heterogenous societies become increasingly reluctant to help others unless coerced by authority or when they see direct personal benefit.
Also, blaming things on “human nature” is a cop-out. It removes agency from individuals and leads us to apathy. It’s the exact kind of thing that powerful figures wants us to feel.
Also, the fact that companies like Dell and HP have Linux offerings available give them bargaining power against Microsoft, which certainly counts as “creating a dent on their business”.
It comes back to what I said before: Linux and Android are useful to companies because they can use it, especially in the case of Google, it allowed them to compete with Apple in the mobile OS market, with the play stores and ad revenues.
Every time you buy an app or game on the Play Store, the total amount is split between Google and the developer. The exact percentage varies, but Google takes a minimum of 15% in exchange for hosting the app and serving it to users.
What interest would any private company to invest in a Reddit-clone? Reddit itself had to enshittify to hell to make profit.
High-trust societies (e.g, the Japanese) are a lot more inclined to support the commons even when not directly required to do so. Low-trust, heterogenous societies become increasingly reluctant to help others unless coerced by authority or when they see direct personal benefit.
Where is the Japanese open-source Reddit clone? You also haven’t provided the example I asked above about an open-source project where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”.
Also, blaming things on “human nature” is a cop-out. It removes agency from individuals and leads us to apathy.
Disregarding human nature leads to unrealistic expectations. I’ll take an example I know well as I post a lot around here.
When I post to a community, I do not expect anything in exchange. I am aware of the 1-9-90 rule , and I know that due to the current population of Lemmy, I won’t find that many other people posting. But that’s okay, I’m fine with that, and I know that over time some other people might come, first to comment, then to post themselves.
Now if I completely refuted that rule, I would be very frustrated. “How come that in a community with 2600 active users per month I am the only one posting?”. I would start making meta post, calling out people “You should post more if you want the community to survive! You not posting is hypocritical as you do not put your time and energy in the platform but just want to use it!”. And that would probably chase people away, without making them post more.
I think I am ready to give up on this conversation.
The worldviews are too different. It makes no sense to make this distinction about “beneficial to companies” and “beneficial to communities” and it actually seems to me like a misunderstanding of why corporations exist in the first place.
Also, sorry if this is harsh, but you are repeatedly showing an inability of abstract thinking. I talk about the Japanese and your reaction is to ask “where is the Japanese Reddit”? Really? Are you expecting that different cultures will converge to the exact type of equivalent artifacts, just with different colors?
(Anyway, I’d posit that the “Japanese Reddit” is misskey, but I already dread the thought you will respond with some silly pontification about how misskey looks more like Twitter than Reddit)
Maybe it is time for to cut my losses and accept that this whole discussion is a waste of time.
Trust me, bro. I am not moving the goal posts, bro. All I need is one example that fits exactly what I want so that I can bring myself to contribute with a few dollars per month. No, paying a small business provider that can reinvest the resources to keep the ecosystem open is not the same, bro… If “the commons” don’t help, why should I, bro…
The math is right there at the post. 8 people working at $10000/month, for 55000 registered users.
Mind you, 10k per month per person is actually still less than the actual cost for a professional admin. You can argue whether they really need that many people, but please don’t question “the math”. It starts to look like gaslighting.
The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.
In any case, what number do you think is reasonable? A quick search shows that Facebook employs about 65000 people to serve 3 billion users, 46k users per employee. Even if we were to ask the hachyderm team to be as productive as one of the largest corporations in the world, we would still need at least 2 FTEs.
But given that we are asking them to be as productive as a FB employee, it should be fair to pay them as much as Facebook does, so the real cost per employee goes easily to something like $250k/year (Base salary + bonus + overhead).
So, okay, let’s cut the number of people by 4 and multiply their cost by ~2. We are now talking about ~$50k/monthly cost. That’s still $0.91/user/month, $5.15/active user/month.
The point is, even if “the math” is skewed to make things look “expensive”, even a more conservative estimate has (a) costs per user in the same order of magnitude and (b) cost of labor absolutely dominating over cost of hardware/hosting.
I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.
More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.
Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.
Meta does a lot more than manage a Mastodon server. A single full-timer is likely all that is needed. Two to reduce burnout. Those costs are still high, but you shouldn’t discredit the notion that eight full timers is an exaggeration. The top comments on the toot you link are the volunteers saying exactly that.
In practice, you’d need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.
So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.
Your question is as short-sighted as “If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?”
No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.
You don’t see admins “asking for money” to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it’s not trying to take over Amazon, but that’s probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn’t realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that’s where the userbase and money is now.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.
Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not “oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!”. They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.
To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their “main business” and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.
I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don’t want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of “cheap, universally available” food.
Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the “community” in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?
You want the Fediverse to replace Twiter/Reddit/Facebook, so billions of users.
I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users. I don’t need the Fediverse to be used by everyone, I just want a place to discuss with enough people.
If you can find a way to finance the Fediverse to pay full time jobs to admins, kudos to you. I just don’t think that’s realistic (we touch on that on another comment thread feddit.org/post/6620726/4078921 )
I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users.
We have that already. The Fediverse as a whole has 1M MAU. Absolutely nothing stopping you from using kbin to follow discussions via groups and/tags.
My point is: the actual number doesn’t really matter. What matters for us to have this place feel “alive” is that it needs to become an actual hub for global conversations. We have achieved that for some groups (e.g, tech and urbanism) but for everything else is mostly a desert, and this is only going to change when we get rid of the current incumbents.
So what? The donations are also supposed to pay for the salaries of the people working there!
The argument is not “no for-profit system is sustainable”, but “no instance is receiving to sustain those working”
Holy crap, arguing here sometimes feel like fighting an army of strawmen… Please stop putting your own ideology and how you think things should be and let’s talk about what how things really are operating.
When you show me one instance that is able to handle a large number of users (more than 10k) and that is financed by voluntary donations, and that the people working on it are paid appropriately to their role and time spent on it, I will gladly concede that the model works.
Until then, we have about 15 years of history since Diaspora, and every attempt at keeping a “free as in beer” community has failed, and in lots of cases spectacularly so. From admins who got doxxed by their own “community”, to people outright giving up on the whole idea (like the feddit.de) to cases where they felt so pressured to keep supporting the people that led them to commit suicide.
In the US maybe. Even in western Europe, 10k $ or € is a buttload of money per month. Something like 4x the net salary of a backend developer here in Belgium where I live.
When I was in devops, my first year was 115k (us) so I think your spot on.
codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com
on 08 Jan 21:25
nextcollapse
I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:
Twitter wanted $10
I know about 1% of users donate
I like having an independent instance run by people I feel ideologically aligned with.
For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.
I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It’s so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I’m still going to pay for independent social media because it’s worth it.
Great, unfortunately you are in the minority. Seems like only around 2% of the users donate to their instances, and even the ones that do are covering only the hardware costs.
rglullis@communick.news
on 08 Jan 16:08
nextcollapse
Paging @rikudou@lemmings.world so that he can see why my service offered for $29/year is actually quite a bargain.
Dude, just get over it. I think you’re charging more than you should, I’m not gonna change my mind if you tag me.
Especially if I can see just from the scale and price that it’s not cost-optimized, they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization, just throwing money at the problem is no longer there.
Comparing your small-scale service to that is dishonest.
they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization,
Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.
Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it’s the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.
your small-scale service
You are going at this backwards. My service is “small scale” because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing “worth to be paid for” is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.
So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don’t care about it.
AwesomeLowlander@sh.itjust.works
on 10 Jan 07:41
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And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars
Isn’t that a major point? If there are many people willing AND HAPPY to run it for free, presumably because they’re getting something intangible out of it, why not leave it to them?
I’m not asking people to stop doing things for free or to have hobbies. What I am saying is, simply, if we really want to get rid of the Elon Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world, we need to get rid of corporate-controlled social media for everyone and all of this “Fediverse” thingy will need a lot more resources than a handful of people doing it “for fun” and the users will have to understand that everyone needs to support them with more than “just enough to cover hardware costs”.
Also, I want to say that I really believe in the Nassim Taleb’s “Skin In The Game” principle: you can only take someone’s opinions seriously when they are willing to take all the risks themselves that comes with it. I solemnly ignore anyone that just complains and/or asks for systemic changes without accepting to pay the price required for those changes. This includes anyone here that keeps talking about “Evil Corporations” and promoting the Fediverse without putting their money where their mouths and paying the full sticker price.
IOW, I’m not upset at the admins that are willing to put a lot of work and time to do things for free, but I’m upset at the majority of users who think that just because someone is willing to work for free that they should not take initiative to help as much as they can. And I know that the majority of Fediverse users have the means to support the admins with more than “just enough to cover hardware costs”.
Bluesky is only marginally better. Just like every other startup that has not achieved a dominant position, if/when they reach critical mass they will become a rent-seeking player, just like every other VC-funded company.
Lol, I run multiple FOSS services online, two of which have thousands of MAUs. I consider myself lucky to be even covering the hardware costs at this point. I would love to even make an extra 500 Eur per month for myself given the amount of time I spend doing sysadmin, automation, PR, development and just being an active part of the communities.
We really need to change in what people consider valuable and how little actually is needed to help. Like literally, all you need to do is spare 1$ per month on your social media that is your primary home. If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.
rglullis@communick.news
on 09 Jan 11:58
nextcollapse
If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.
I completely agree in principle. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority (like 98% of them) don’t do that, and they just expect to keep using things for free, until whoever is backing the thing gets broke and/or burned out.
And when it happens, they just move on to the next instance. Rinse, repeat. Like locusts.
The things is, there’s plenty of people who are willing to open their wallet for their services, they just prefer paying corporations, instead of donating to FOSS.
TonyOstrich@lemmy.world
on 09 Jan 13:04
nextcollapse
I don’t know how it could possibly be implemented, but I wish there was some kind of application or token that ran on my devices that would track how much I visited or used various pieces of FOSS software and services and then at the end of every month would pay each one from a predefined amount of money I set for how much I think I can afford for all of it. Maybe before actually sending the payments it generates a report stating the breakdown and allowing me to tweak the percentages.
Likely a privacy nightmare even if entirely locally running, but would be sweet.
Unfortunately Lemmy itself has too much cringe tankie baggage to be a real home. More like a refugee camp while this new social media epoch sorts itself out. But it's very hard to want to support a project which has been so petty and openly hostile to so many users. "Get a different instance" only gets you so far here.
I am not defederated from hexbear or lemmy.ml and I don’t even see that many tankies. They stick to their comms usually and those that venture out usually know to behave. Every social media site is “hostile to many users”. Show me one that isn’t.
meta makes 156B per year, assuming 3.98B users per year (average monthly active users). that’s about 39$ revenue per user per year and 3.2$ per user per month.
If you want to make that kind of money, i think they only realistic option adding ads with an option to pay to disable the ads. i never saw a open source project raises that kind of money with fundraising. even then i am not sure it will work because i think i read a report that people who block ads basically don’t read them when they can’t block so those ads will make no money.
threaded - newest
9$/month to send toots? Really?
Does this apply to lemmy 1/1?
Yes, unless you want Lemmy instances without any admins.
Good. I feel good about donating then
That is orthogonal to the issue. Historically, only around 2% of the users donate, and the overwhelming majority thinks that donations should be only to cover the costs of hosting+hardware. What OP is showing is that the real cost that goes unpaid is the labor of the admins and moderators.
I wish to get paid for my labor writing this comment.
Do you really think your comment is as valuable of a contribution as those made by the ones running the servers and ensuring that the place is not run over by trolls and spammers?
Are you seriously that entitled to someone else’s time and work?
It was an attempt at humor. :)
Ok let me say it in a better way. People who work in IT do it because they like it. Many of the first world wide web pages or YouTube videos were made without anyone wanting any money for it. There was no profit motive or expectation whatsoever.
That’s why I thought it was funny to read how instance owners are doing labor without getting paid, as if that was the purpose of the instance. To get paid for running it.
To me that’s funny. It’s a bit like me painting a painting and putting it out there, and asking people to pay for my labor. The hours I spent making it. Because now the painting exists in the world. Who is gonna pay for it?
I believe instance admins are more than happy running the instance without profit motive. Because it’s nice to be part of giving something to a community of people.
raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/
Yes. Communities cannot exist without community members.
In the grand scheme of things, community members are individually easier to replace than those keeping the service running. E.g, take any community with more than a few hundred users and lose half of them, randomly. Now, take half of the instance admins. More likely than not, the instance will simply stop existing.
Humans are not interchangeable components… that’s a disgusting take, honestly…
Every community I’ve been in can feel through loss in some way, of a member.
This attitude is exactly why you cannot fathom why maybe small instances, ran by volunteers for the community is a viable concept.
Its also why BBSes started their death spiral: people trying to commoditize the community.
We are talking about different things. Very different things.
I am not saying that small communities are not viable. I am saying that without substantial financial support, all we are going to get is small communities, and we are not going to be able to compete with the corporate mainstream.
If your ambition is just to keep some obscure corner of the internet, fine. If you want to take back the internet away from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Reddit, then we need to get a lot more help than just a dozen people pitching in to cover server bills. It will require work. It will require coordination. It will require resilience. It will require sacrifices.
Being upset at Zuckerberg, or making campaigns to “Boycott Threads” is not going to do anything if our side is orders of magnitude smaller than theirs. They will still be exploiting their users. And even if you personally don’t use it, or your “community” doesn’t use it, there are still plenty of people that I care about that do.
I dunno if I speak for everyone else, but all we need are small.communities.
We are not “competing” with anyone or anything.
That’s the root of your issue, and it’s based on a false premise.
You are definitely not speaking for the billions of people that are still in the large networks. Do you think they prefer to use Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok because it’s somehow better, or because of network effects?
And then the people will move elsewhere
Isn’t that the point of federation, to be able to use another node if needed?
No. Being able to move is an advantage compared to centralized platforms, but it is not the “point” of it. It makes the system overall more robust, but it doesn’t guarantee or protect the individuals that are part of it.
Do you think that the world wide web would reach the size that it has today if websites had such a short shelf-life? Of course not. It would remain just a geeky curiosity, just like Lemmy or Mastodon. There is a reason why Bluesky is adding one million users per week while we are here counting the same dozen of active people since summer 2023. People generally do not care about how the system works, they just want to something that helps them achieve their goals or solves their problems.
I know you like hyperboles, but Bsky’s growth slowed quite a bit:
The main reason it’s much more successful than Mastodon is content discoverability
Agreed. And the problem Reddit and Lemmy solve is becoming a niche issue
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Meanwhile, the Mastodon devs are all sharing the belief that they are saints who are working “for the community”. Sorry, it’s not enough. We are not going to amount to much if our ambitions are that low.
It doesn’t matter the format. This is not (specifically) about Reddit, or Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok.
This is a discussion about a model that can keep sustainable development and operations of an open web. ActivityPub as whole allows us to think in much broader terms than “replacing Reddit” or "replacing Youtube. The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven’t reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on “high profile” posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it’s as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We’ll never know.
Okay, let’s go that route. As I said above, short video/“stories” format is king with people below 29 years old, be it Snapchat, Tiktok or BeReal statista.com/…/us-distribution-leading-social-med…
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.
At the end, that’s an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don’t care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.
I don’t really see how to solve this issue.
Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.
Hosting video is not the expensive part. It’s the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.
Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don’t want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is “expensive”, and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don’t see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what “teenagers” will or will not do.
Why is that “every teenager” is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc… but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
It doesn’t have to be between the two extremes of “free, but you get your data exploited” and “user pays everything”. Alternative business models will show up. Brave’s model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services (“Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!” “iCloud now supports ActivityPub”) is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn’t get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on “community” alone.
Then why isn’t PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?
Why are you attacking me personally? Is it supposed to convince me to pay 29$/year for your service? If yes, sorry to say, but that’s not very effective, and I will keep donating to other instances like lemmy.zip, feddit.org or sopuli.xyz
If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.
Steam has no subscription, what do you mean?
Spotify and Netflix are usually used in a family bundle because their parents find it convenient. But with the rising prices of streaming services, I see more and more people cancelling them and pirating content.
Did we get there because every Linux user paid a subscription to use the operating system?
Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.
It’s not an attack, but it is curious that you feel it is. I am using you as an example because you are one of the most active users here, you are frequently found promoting the Fediverse as an alternative, yet you don’t find it important to support the people that are working to keep the whole thing running.
I am using you as an example to show this common behavior here of people complaining about the state of the social media and exploitative companies, while at the same time exploiting the goodwill of the dozen people who are volunteering their time and money to put up this alternatives.
It’s pure hypocrisy. I don’t care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.
Only those who are completely financially illiterate would fall for such a ridiculous proposition.
Seriously, I don’t know anymore if you are arguing in the good faith.
The point is that we got there by having professionals being paid to work on it.
Content creators get paid via Patreon. There are several channels who use that way to sustain themselves. Patreon is a donation-based model, not a subscription.
It is, especially with the bold emphasis on “You”. You saying it’s not doesn’t deny that fact.
According to you. The day other admins will tell us that they can’t make the projects live anymore without additional donations, we can discuss this again. In the meantime, there is no indication that your statement is correct.
There is no free lunch, but in Facebook/Reddit/Twitter case they sell ads and user data to make money. And the vast majority of the population seems okay with that.
Professionals who got paid because they were delivering a product or a service to companies.
Which company is going to pay to get more features or a professional version of Lemmy or Piefed?
Lemmy is for personal use, not corporate, and that’s the main difference with Linux or Firefox. It is closer to something like gnucash.org than to a Linux distribution.
wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Contributing_to_GnuCash
To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.
And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.
Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.
So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don’t have to.
Indeed, so how would you plan to move enough people to PeerTube for this to change? As long as Youtube is a viable product, there is no real space for any other video website.
Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple’s business for personal computers?
Could you show me an example in the tech/dev/opensource space where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”? Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.
Yes! Android is Linux based and dominates market share worldwide.
For desktop, Linux has 4-5% of usage share worldwide, going up to 13% in India. If you include ChromeOS (which is also Linux based) the figures get close to 10% worldwide. Also, the fact that companies like Dell and HP have Linux offerings available give them bargaining power against Microsoft, which certainly counts as “creating a dent on their business”.
It’s not “human nature”. It’s a cultural issue. High-trust societies (e.g, the Japanese) are a lot more inclined to support the commons even when not directly required to do so. Low-trust, heterogenous societies become increasingly reluctant to help others unless coerced by authority or when they see direct personal benefit.
Also, blaming things on “human nature” is a cop-out. It removes agency from individuals and leads us to apathy. It’s the exact kind of thing that powerful figures wants us to feel.
Android is led by Google, with all their resources, both in terms of devs and money.
source.android.com
It comes back to what I said before: Linux and Android are useful to companies because they can use it, especially in the case of Google, it allowed them to compete with Apple in the mobile OS market, with the play stores and ad revenues.
androidauthority.com/how-does-google-make-money-f…
What interest would any private company to invest in a Reddit-clone? Reddit itself had to enshittify to hell to make profit.
Where is the Japanese open-source Reddit clone? You also haven’t provided the example I asked above about an open-source project where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”.
Disregarding human nature leads to unrealistic expectations. I’ll take an example I know well as I post a lot around here.
When I post to a community, I do not expect anything in exchange. I am aware of the 1-9-90 rule , and I know that due to the current population of Lemmy, I won’t find that many other people posting. But that’s okay, I’m fine with that, and I know that over time some other people might come, first to comment, then to post themselves.
Now if I completely refuted that rule, I would be very frustrated. “How come that in a community with 2600 active users per month I am the only one posting?”. I would start making meta post, calling out people “You should post more if you want the community to survive! You not posting is hypocritical as you do not put your time and energy in the platform but just want to use it!”. And that would probably chase people away, without making them post more.
I think I am ready to give up on this conversation.
The worldviews are too different. It makes no sense to make this distinction about “beneficial to companies” and “beneficial to communities” and it actually seems to me like a misunderstanding of why corporations exist in the first place.
Also, sorry if this is harsh, but you are repeatedly showing an inability of abstract thinking. I talk about the Japanese and your reaction is to ask “where is the Japanese Reddit”? Really? Are you expecting that different cultures will converge to the exact type of equivalent artifacts, just with different colors?
(Anyway, I’d posit that the “Japanese Reddit” is misskey, but I already dread the thought you will respond with some silly pontification about how misskey looks more like Twitter than Reddit)
Maybe it is time for to cut my losses and accept that this whole discussion is a waste of time.
Which is correct. Misskey doesn’t have subreddit/Lemmy communities, it’s a microblogging format.
Edit : still no example of an open-source project where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”.
Trust me, bro. I am not moving the goal posts, bro. All I need is one example that fits exactly what I want so that I can bring myself to contribute with a few dollars per month. No, paying a small business provider that can reinvest the resources to keep the ecosystem open is not the same, bro… If “the commons” don’t help, why should I, bro…
<img alt="Excuses and poor rationalizations" src="https://media0.giphy.com/media/l46C8pSaCzoiZVXAk/200w.webp">.
A Thanos in the making, I see…
Yes, and it’s a fair point as well.
lemmy.world/post/19466047
Thank you! I think in the end it all converges on the same point: support your instances if you like them online
Indeed!
That seems super expensive, and/or some bad math like 4 users on a paid server.
Edit: gets accused of gaslighting by OP… Stay classy! Still Super expensive BTW.
The math is right there at the post. 8 people working at $10000/month, for 55000 registered users.
Mind you, 10k per month per person is actually still less than the actual cost for a professional admin. You can argue whether they really need that many people, but please don’t question “the math”. It starts to look like gaslighting.
The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.
In any case, what number do you think is reasonable? A quick search shows that Facebook employs about 65000 people to serve 3 billion users, 46k users per employee. Even if we were to ask the hachyderm team to be as productive as one of the largest corporations in the world, we would still need at least 2 FTEs.
But given that we are asking them to be as productive as a FB employee, it should be fair to pay them as much as Facebook does, so the real cost per employee goes easily to something like $250k/year (Base salary + bonus + overhead).
So, okay, let’s cut the number of people by 4 and multiply their cost by ~2. We are now talking about ~$50k/monthly cost. That’s still $0.91/user/month, $5.15/active user/month.
The point is, even if “the math” is skewed to make things look “expensive”, even a more conservative estimate has (a) costs per user in the same order of magnitude and (b) cost of labor absolutely dominating over cost of hardware/hosting.
I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.
More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.
Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.
Meta does a lot more than manage a Mastodon server. A single full-timer is likely all that is needed. Two to reduce burnout. Those costs are still high, but you shouldn’t discredit the notion that eight full timers is an exaggeration. The top comments on the toot you link are the volunteers saying exactly that.
In practice, you’d need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.
So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.
18 months after the API debacle on Reddit, most of the instances are still around. If the model was not sustainable, wouldn’t have all closed?
Your question is as short-sighted as “If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?”
No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.
If admins need more money, they can ask for help to their communities.
Lemmy.zip seems to be doing okay: lemmy.zip/post/29448608?scrollToComments=true
Lemm.ee had a question about a donation link and never answered lemm.ee/post/49850162?scrollToComments=true
I know a few instance admins who runs their instances on hardware they would be using anyway.
Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven’t seen such request ever.
Do you realize the issue with this reasoning? Here’s a hint.
<img alt="Survivorship Bias" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Survivorship-bias.svg/600px-Survivorship-bias.svg.png">
You don’t see admins “asking for money” to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it’s not trying to take over Amazon, but that’s probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn’t realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that’s where the userbase and money is now.
Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.
Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not “oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!”. They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.
To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their “main business” and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.
The focus was on volunteering projects lasting a long time.
Which is the wrong focus.
I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don’t want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of “cheap, universally available” food.
As usual, agree to disagree
“agree to disagree…” On what, exactly?
Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the “community” in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?
You want the Fediverse to replace Twiter/Reddit/Facebook, so billions of users.
I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users. I don’t need the Fediverse to be used by everyone, I just want a place to discuss with enough people.
If you can find a way to finance the Fediverse to pay full time jobs to admins, kudos to you. I just don’t think that’s realistic (we touch on that on another comment thread feddit.org/post/6620726/4078921 )
We have that already. The Fediverse as a whole has 1M MAU. Absolutely nothing stopping you from using kbin to follow discussions via groups and/tags.
My point is: the actual number doesn’t really matter. What matters for us to have this place feel “alive” is that it needs to become an actual hub for global conversations. We have achieved that for some groups (e.g, tech and urbanism) but for everything else is mostly a desert, and this is only going to change when we get rid of the current incumbents.
This logic would mean all nonprofits would fail. It’s flawed.
What do you mean? Even non-profits have income and pay salaries to the people working there.
Many 501c3 orgs only bring income in through donations.
So what? The donations are also supposed to pay for the salaries of the people working there!
The argument is not “no for-profit system is sustainable”, but “no instance is receiving to sustain those working”
Holy crap, arguing here sometimes feel like fighting an army of strawmen… Please stop putting your own ideology and how you think things should be and let’s talk about what how things really are operating.
Kettle?
When you show me one instance that is able to handle a large number of users (more than 10k) and that is financed by voluntary donations, and that the people working on it are paid appropriately to their role and time spent on it, I will gladly concede that the model works.
Until then, we have about 15 years of history since Diaspora, and every attempt at keeping a “free as in beer” community has failed, and in lots of cases spectacularly so. From admins who got doxxed by their own “community”, to people outright giving up on the whole idea (like the feddit.de) to cases where they felt so pressured to keep supporting the people that led them to commit suicide.
Sorry, what?
In the US maybe. Even in western Europe, 10k $ or € is a buttload of money per month. Something like 4x the net salary of a backend developer here in Belgium where I live.
Add taxes, employee benefits, mandatory health insurance (like in Germany), pension and so on. Employees’ total cost is easily 2x their gross salary.
.
When I was in devops, my first year was 115k (us) so I think your spot on.
I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:
For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.
I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It’s so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I’m still going to pay for independent social media because it’s worth it.
Great, unfortunately you are in the minority. Seems like only around 2% of the users donate to their instances, and even the ones that do are covering only the hardware costs.
Paging @rikudou@lemmings.world so that he can see why my service offered for $29/year is actually quite a bargain.
Dude, just get over it. I think you’re charging more than you should, I’m not gonna change my mind if you tag me.
Especially if I can see just from the scale and price that it’s not cost-optimized, they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization, just throwing money at the problem is no longer there.
Comparing your small-scale service to that is dishonest.
Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.
Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it’s the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.
You are going at this backwards. My service is “small scale” because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing “worth to be paid for” is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.
So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don’t care about it.
Isn’t that a major point? If there are many people willing AND HAPPY to run it for free, presumably because they’re getting something intangible out of it, why not leave it to them?
I’m not asking people to stop doing things for free or to have hobbies. What I am saying is, simply, if we really want to get rid of the Elon Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world, we need to get rid of corporate-controlled social media for everyone and all of this “Fediverse” thingy will need a lot more resources than a handful of people doing it “for fun” and the users will have to understand that everyone needs to support them with more than “just enough to cover hardware costs”.
Also, I want to say that I really believe in the Nassim Taleb’s “Skin In The Game” principle: you can only take someone’s opinions seriously when they are willing to take all the risks themselves that comes with it. I solemnly ignore anyone that just complains and/or asks for systemic changes without accepting to pay the price required for those changes. This includes anyone here that keeps talking about “Evil Corporations” and promoting the Fediverse without putting their money where their mouths and paying the full sticker price.
IOW, I’m not upset at the admins that are willing to put a lot of work and time to do things for free, but I’m upset at the majority of users who think that just because someone is willing to work for free that they should not take initiative to help as much as they can. And I know that the majority of Fediverse users have the means to support the admins with more than “just enough to cover hardware costs”.
Then promote Bluesky. This one could succeed.
Bluesky is only marginally better. Just like every other startup that has not achieved a dominant position, if/when they reach critical mass they will become a rent-seeking player, just like every other VC-funded company.
Their protocol is open, but not really decentralized. It is very clear that they want to become a single global indexer of the whole social web.
Bsky will probably enshittify. But if the priority is to get people off Twitter, it’s the most likely successful alternative short term.
Hopefully long term Mastodon and others will find a way to solve the content discoverability issue.
.
Lol, I run multiple FOSS services online, two of which have thousands of MAUs. I consider myself lucky to be even covering the hardware costs at this point. I would love to even make an extra 500 Eur per month for myself given the amount of time I spend doing sysadmin, automation, PR, development and just being an active part of the communities.
We really need to change in what people consider valuable and how little actually is needed to help. Like literally, all you need to do is spare 1$ per month on your social media that is your primary home. If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.
I completely agree in principle. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority (like 98% of them) don’t do that, and they just expect to keep using things for free, until whoever is backing the thing gets broke and/or burned out.
And when it happens, they just move on to the next instance. Rinse, repeat. Like locusts.
The things is, there’s plenty of people who are willing to open their wallet for their services, they just prefer paying corporations, instead of donating to FOSS.
I don’t know how it could possibly be implemented, but I wish there was some kind of application or token that ran on my devices that would track how much I visited or used various pieces of FOSS software and services and then at the end of every month would pay each one from a predefined amount of money I set for how much I think I can afford for all of it. Maybe before actually sending the payments it generates a report stating the breakdown and allowing me to tweak the percentages.
Likely a privacy nightmare even if entirely locally running, but would be sweet.
Unfortunately Lemmy itself has too much cringe tankie baggage to be a real home. More like a refugee camp while this new social media epoch sorts itself out. But it's very hard to want to support a project which has been so petty and openly hostile to so many users. "Get a different instance" only gets you so far here.
Lemmy might go, Piefed might rise. ActivityPub is there to stay.
I am not defederated from hexbear or lemmy.ml and I don’t even see that many tankies. They stick to their comms usually and those that venture out usually know to behave. Every social media site is “hostile to many users”. Show me one that isn’t.
Testing poop poop poop
meta makes 156B per year, assuming 3.98B users per year (average monthly active users). that’s about 39$ revenue per user per year and 3.2$ per user per month.
If you want to make that kind of money, i think they only realistic option adding ads with an option to pay to disable the ads. i never saw a open source project raises that kind of money with fundraising. even then i am not sure it will work because i think i read a report that people who block ads basically don’t read them when they can’t block so those ads will make no money.