The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent
(mstdn.social)
from rglullis@communick.news to fediverse@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 2025 01:48
https://communick.news/post/2809437
from rglullis@communick.news to fediverse@lemmy.world on 26 Mar 2025 01:48
https://communick.news/post/2809437
Please, tell me how “paying for hardware costs is enough”…
threaded - newest
Rent comes before server. An outage is a wonderful motivator, turn that shit off.
I assume he’s applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.
Or we could drop the whole idea of depending on “donations” and understand that admins are professionals who would like to make a living like everyone else?
I’m fine having the burden spread unevenly. I don’t mind donating more so that a free platform is available to anyone who wants to use it. Whether something is funded by donations or fees is separate from whether the cost of people’s time should be included in the revenue target.
Yeah, but where are the admins who dare to say “I think my work is worth $15k/month, so I will only keep the instance open if we collect that much money”?
There aren’t, because the majority of users will see that “profiteering” and flat out refuse to contribute. Or they will come up with the worst excuses to diminish the work of the admins, which in the end translate to “I don’t make that much money, how could I justify accepting that your work is more valuable than mine?” crab mentality.
Unfortunately we have a whole generaton of entitled babies who scream “paywall!!!” every time somebody asks for compensation for their work
Nah, don’t give that much credit to a loud minority.
The distinction is an illusion. If a person can’t afford to live, and a part of their life is running a server, who gives a fuck which dollar goes where?
(Other than all the dipshits who offer 0 and demand anything more than nothing.)
It depends on if the shortfall in rent is coming from something server related. If stux is pulling a good salary for his hosting work and the shortfall just came from a different job falling through, that’s a fine time to ask for donations, but not something people would feel warrants shutting down the server rather than taking out a loan.
stux blocked at least one of my fediverse identities and I recognize I’m not objective but if he can’t keep the instance online then like ok.
So? Do, or don’t. Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running, or it doesn’t and goes under.
Altruism doesn’t pay the bills; but it doesn’t hurt to ask. Can’t blame them for that.
Yeah, so he’s asking.
You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.
I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.
Are yall not sponsoring this project on patreon or otherwise?
I pitch in something like 1-2 bucks to desalines and a few bucks to .world every month.
You are the exception, and you will find out that even the most prolific participants here claiming that $5 per year is enough to cover the hardware costs, so he doesn’t see any reason to give more than that.
If you see this go to the patreon rn and sign up for like, $1 a month.
I didn’t realize there was patrons for lemmy instances
Shit aint free.
I mean when we were over at (the bad place), people were literally donating monthly to pay for server costs. (the bad place) in the early days was basically one giant instance.
except it didnt have a working video player. for-fucking-ever.
so I donate a bit to my mortal enemy @desalines and a bit to lemmy.world to keep the project going. Maybe 5 bucks a month between the two?
Context for people reading this: feddit.org/post/2600584
Recent discussion I had with rglullis: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17448295
For lemmy.world / mastodon.world including some of the smaller instances we host, it’s like 0,06 euro per active user per month. If every active user would pay 2 Euro per year that would be enough to cover hosting costs. If every active user would pay 1 euro per month, I could quit my dayjob and focus on the Fediverse fulltime.
(Sidenote: Stux and I created the non-profit Fedihosting Foundation which owns lemmy.world … but finances are still separate for his and my instances)
Thank you for providing data for LW, and thank you for your sysadmin work!
While we are talking, there have been occurrences of “power tripping” by some LW mods (e.g. lemmy.world/post/23229045/14411568?sort=New) , is there any mechanism to escalate this to you?
Sending e-mail to info at lemmy dot world would be the best option. The team will pick that up.
(By the way: 2 EUR per year would be enough if every active user would donate that but they don’t)
Thanks, I might send an email later.
Indeed. Have you thought about promoting this in an announcement post?
We have done before, but don’t do that often, so we don’t bother users too much. But we might do again soon, and maybe do a monthly post on the mastodons/sharkeys etc
Sounds good. db0 started to add flairs, including one for donators, maybe that’s something you can consider as well:
Phrased another way: “I don’t think you are allowed to make a living out of the work you do here, so thank you for accepting all this for free”.
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17470674
The list of statements where you have the chance to share your values is still unanswered.
I answered here 5 days ago: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17470674
Which, for some reason, didn’t make it to your instance? communick.news/comment/4930027
Both versions of the post also show 106 vs 105 comments, so there seems to be something here
I specifically said “you can just say agree or disagree”, so please don’t come with that “It would take too much time”.
Please don’t erase nuance from a conversation. Everything isn’t yes or no answers.
Please start with the yes or no, the nuances can come after you plainly state your opinion about how much the work of admins is valuable to you.
Please reply to that comment lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17470674
No, thanks. I will not engage in any further discussion with you until you explicitly answer those statements.
Then we can stop talking for a while, I have other priorities. For people reading this, here’s the content of my last comment.
You want to run a business.
Other admins are giving their time and energy without expecting to be paid. Ruud below just said it in an “If every active user would pay 1 euro per month, I could quit my dayjob and focus on the Fediverse fulltime”, but that seems to be more like hypothetical scenario consideration than actually looking for this. Evidence: lack of recurring posts calling for funding on LW.
That’s what I meant with the disagreement. Are you managing your instances pro bono or not? It seems like you are not, and you’re the only admin who wants to create a business out of instances.
I don’t think I’m going to answer the list of questions now because they require longer answers. Maybe later if I have some time.
Also, we’ve had that conversation many times. I see the local volunteers run library, or the hiking club, you want to make the system profitable so that admins and developers can make a living out of it.
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27053532/13176946
Thanks for making it clear that you are evading giving your straightforward opinion for the following statements:
Sorry for not having answering a 12 questions form as my top priority
Start with the top 3. A simple “yes” or “no”.
That’s borderline harassment
You called me dishonest when I said that you were evading to answer your opinion on the value of the work from admins. I ask you then to make it as clear as possible, to remove any chance of doubt.
You put a bunch of links to past conversations, but you highlight things that are not the main point of the argument and take things out of context, and you have the audacity to claim you are doing it “for context”.
Now that I got wise about your games and decided to ask you to provide receipts, you continue to evade the answer and are showing you’d rather play the victim than owning up to your opinions.
That’s your perspective. People reading our current and past discussions will make their own opinions.
You want to make a living out of the platform, to make a business out of it. I prefer it to be run by volunteers. That’s the core difference between our visions. The 12 questions seem a bit much while the difference is quite obvious
This right here is a good example of you taking things out of context and not caring about “nuance” when it is convenient to you
Is it? Then why is it so problematic for you to say:
Is this comment not true anymore?
lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27053532/13176946
Are we stuck in a loop? Because it seems that yet again you are bringing things out of context and using it as a shield to avoid giving out your opinion.
You have the time to chase things around and select clips of whatever supports your worldview, but you do not have the time to say “I don’t think admins should be compensated for their work”.
I’m trying to just end this conversation, but you keep bringing stuff I have to debunk based on your previous statements.
Is the previous comment not true anymore?
Yeah, you keep trying to end the conversation because you painted yourself to a corner and you refuse to publicly admit that you do not want to support admins and FOSS developers.
The whole comment is true. Including the part where I say
I’m honestly tired of this crab mentality. People think it’s a sin to be upfront about their work and how much they value their time. It’s also quite ironic that I can see the huge overlap: those who are always virtue signaling and complaining about bosses who don’t pay enough to their employees are the same ones who refuse to patronize a small independent business
Why couldn’t you highlight this part instead?
No. As stated several times, I do support admins. Now do I think Lemmy admins should be able to make a living out of managing an instance? Based on what we see (Ruud comment stating that not all active users give even 2€ per year to LW, which is the largest instance), it seems unrealistic. Maybe LW starts promoting donations more and get more income soon, that would be nice to see.
Sorry to tell you, but you’re here with the crabs. And you can try to argue all you want that people should donate more to the admins and the devs, the reality is this is not happening. People might donate a few bucks per month to their instance, but providing enough money so that several sysadmins and programmers make a living out of Lemmy?
If you can’t see the difference between employees of companies providing millions to stakeholders and 50k monthly active users, I don’t know what to tell you.
As a general comment, your tone is always very confrontational. If you really want to start making money out of this platform, you might want to ask someone to manage your comments and posts.
Again, paying out to cover hardware costs is not the same as supporting the admins.
Holy $%&! what a contortionist way to avoid the response! You are sounding like a Monty Python comedy sketch.
I’m not asking what you think is “realistic”. I’m asking whether you think admins should be compensated for their work.
Should I try again, or can I just assume that your answer is “no, I do not think that admins need to be compensated for their work.” ?
Speak for yourself, then. But at least you are starting to show some honesty and admitting that you rather pull people down to your level instead of acknowledge the value of the work done by admins and developers.
You are getting at this exactly backwards.
It’s not the employees of tech companies who complain about poor pay. Quite the opposite.
And the reason that Lemmy can not grow past 50k users is because the Fediverse is stuck on a horrible culture where they refuse to even acknowledge that the work of admins and developers is valuable, so those with the skills that could take the Fediverse to the next level are not going to be sacrificing themselves to serve a bunch of people who think they are entitled to free work from others just because they themselves are not able to do it.
That’s your opinion. Do you really believe that if admins were unhappy with the current situation, they would keep “working for free” instead of shutting down the instances and moving on with their lives? What is stopping an admin unwilling to “give away their labor for free” from doing so?
The realism is the part you are missing? Do I think that everyone here should be paid for their work? Yes, of course. Sysadmins, developers, moderators, Fediverse advocates, active posters, even commenters deserve something, as every of those roles make the platform alive.
And you know that well as you are usually complaining no one posts on your communities or instances.
But stating that doesn’t bring us anywhere. Where is this money we supposedly all deserve going to come from? Nowhere, because there is none. Or actually there is, but just enough to cover the server costs.
Do you see the Photon, Voyager, Mbin, Piefed developers going around like you treating the whole platform as crabs? Of all of the instance admins, you’re the only one having this discourse.
How much money can a 50k community can provide?
If the Fediverse is such a horrible culture, why are you still here? Why don’t you just create a startup, get some venture capital investments, create your superior social media platform, and then share it with us?
Again, you are going at this backwards.
Instead of asking yourself why the network can reach a few million users even when admins are unpaid, you should be wondering how much bigger the network would be if the current users appropriately invested in the ecosystem.
Amazing. By equating the value of the work provided by admins and developers (which you can not do) to the work of “Fediverse advocates and active posters” (which you want to do) you create a false equivalence that you think excuses you from giving full credit to others.
You said you did not respond to the original statements because “it would take too much time”. Now, you spent more time trying to find a reasonable justification for your unwillingness to acknowledge the higher value of someone else’s contribution and you still didn’t give a straight out answer and resort to rhetorical tricks.
First: who is “we”, here? Are you really implying that you should be getting money by participating?
Second: the money exists. You and many others can pay $10-20 / year for the service being provided to you. The problem is that you (and many others) do not want to acknowledge the value of the work and refuse to contribute beyond “covering the cost of hardware”.
Actually, you’re right, I don’t have time for this. People will read this conversation and make their own minds.
I did make my position clear many times, you just don’t want to understand it.
Yeah, you made it clear that you:
You made clear that you
Two can play that game
Not worth it, we had that conversation several times already
Are you a child? Who has discussions like this??
Thank you for chiming in
You are right. These types of discussions are beyond silly. But you might not be aware that this back-and-forth between me and Blaze is going for months already and whenever he is asked about how he values the work of admins and FOSS developers, he goes full gas-lighting mode and refuses to answer.
I did answer: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40782400/17578308
What do you mean “so?” Maybe it does provide enough value. Not enough people know that they have to pay real money to keep the servers running. Thus the request…
I meant it as “So what if they ask for help? Do, or don’t (donate)”
The initial post came off to me as a dig at the admin for openly asking for money.
The early internet was so good because it mainly consisted from academics or people willing to share knowledge and exchange it. Modern internet is dying because of the fact that most of users are leeches and don’t contribute to the equation. Most tech youtube channels are dying because there is no gratification for content creators, it takes a lot of time, money to produce the content and they get no benefit. The end effect is they shut the whole thing down, thank you for the “service”, you only contribute to the internet “quality” downfall
I think you’re misreading my reply (or i worded it poorly). I agree with you 100% and do contribute to the instances I use and the content creators I watch.
Seriously. If this is your main instance, set up monthly donations. Even if it’s just 1$/£/€ or whatever. Times 16k that’s $16,000+/month. I donate to mine every month.
The fediverse is free because someone else is paying for it out of their own pocket. Not because they’re collecting and selling your private data. So do your part. It’s for the greater good and the freedom of the internet.
I mean, unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating. Nobody should be expecting to setup an instance an expect tens of thousands of dollars a month.
As an indie dev back in the day, it’s a fraction of uses are willing to fork anything at all.
If anything, if you’re a whale, go big on your individual donation if you want a large impact.
Either way, you shouldn’t need that much money to cover server costs for a mere 16,000 users.
I understand your point. But, I don’t think anyone here is creating instances in the hopes of collecting money. They’re just trying to keep the internet free (as in speech). And no, it probably doesn’t cost that much for a server with 16k users, but it still costs something and someone is paying for that out of pocket.
We have to understand that we’re at a crossroads right now. Most of the internet is dominated by GAFAM and they control the access to information and how it’s provided. They control the narrative and have a huge bias in favor of unfettered capitalism and fascism. They not only use your own personal information for profit, but hey also benefit from government subsidies paid by taxpayers.
Meanwhile you have a government that’s increasingly cutting funding for almost everything, including important organizations that fund critical open source projects.
If we want a free (as in speech) internet, we have to understand it comes at a cost and we can’t rely on governments to fund these projects. It’s up to us to put our money where our mouth is.
I’m by no means a whale. But, if us little fishes all band together, we can become even bigger than a whale.
It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.
$10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to “free stuff” offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying “Everyone using the service needs to pay for it” is seen as an heretic.
communick.news sidebar
And each one of them should be commended for having a better understanding of ethics than you and all others who are only interested in participating if they can exploit free labor.
Funny, because as much as I like the platform you’re probably the most confrontational person I’ve ever met here, and that says a lot.
Well.
Users don’t really know what admins are up to.
I’m 100% positive there’s state honeypot instances, and Lemmy being what it is you don’t even really need users on it to keep track of people.
.
How about minding your own business?
Shit happens, unexpected costs come up.
It’s not like there’s massive global financial instability going on…
Doesn’t the Netherlands help you pay for your home if you’re too poor to be able to yourself?
I’m not saying don’t give anything, just wondering.
I would assume “,being late on rent from mastodon server costs” is not an acceptable reason
Things doesn’t usually work like that.
Rent subsidiaries work by your annual income and usually the cost of your rent.
For instance they may pay you 300€ a month for your rent as long as your income is less than 30.000€ a year and your rent is bellow 800€/month. And increasing the thresholds if you have kids or if you are part of a protected collective.
They may be above these thresholds. It’s pretty common in Europe for people who struggle to meet ends are above the needed thresholds for getting help. As prices have gone really up and the bar for being lower class have change a lot lately as there is a lot of new extremely poor people to help. So money don’t end up being enough for all. And people with normal jobs and who live alone or with their SO usually do not get any help even if they need it.
The welfare state is kind of falling apart in the latest years.
Makes sense :)
I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.
I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people’s servers.
Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?
You don’t have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don’t need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn’t en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I’m just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage. I already pay for that regardless as I use it for other things. Though ideally I would not want to allocate more than 500Gb for a one person instance, idk how reasonable would that be.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you’ll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
And now that I’m wondering things I wonder how feasible would it be to host very small instances on cheap devices like sbc or cheap mini-pc. Maybe aiming for thousands of instances with a few dozen people in each instead of a few dozen of instances with thousand of people in them.
No, federation is a lot easier than setting up an email server and 500GB of media storage should be enough for a long time for Lemmy. For the microblogging side, it will depend on how many media-heavy people you follow. If you follow hundreds of photographers, you will need to clear your remote media every once in a while.
I haven't tried an OG Mastodon server, but currently running a GotoSocial instance, just for me.
With mostly the default retention etc. settings, the instance takes at most a couple gigs of storage space. If some image has been rotated, it will be refetched if you view the post again.
As for Federation, a single user instance is probably not a good idea if you're just starting with the Fediverse. Only content from accounts a user on your server follows will reach your server, including posts boosted by the people someone follows. I was already following about 150 accounts when I set it up, so I didn't really notice much difference in the home feed.
OG Mastodon can utilize relays, which will help with the lack of content.
For following topics, I made another user that follows some hashtag bots from fedi.buzz. The bots boost all posts with specific hashtags, so the posts reach my server.
If I were to do this again, I'd probably go with full Mastodon instead of GtS, just because I like the UI. There are other niceties too.
I think there's no way to keep the same domain while changing the underlying server software, without breaking federation. If someone knows a way I'd be really interested.
I’m running my instance for the same reason, it’s been running for over a year and I’m the only active user. Although there’s people passively using it as well.
Storage doesn’t go over 100GB much. The only downside I notice is a community on Lemmy is only federated if at least one of the users is subscribed to it. Using Lemmy-federate you can add a bot account that subscribes to new communities.
I’ve run a couple single-user Pleroma and Akkoma instances for 1 to 3 years each, one of them with a lot of follows in both directions and plenty of multimedia, and it worked fine on hardware 6 generations old on a crappy Comcast plan proxied thru a $4/mo VPS.
Other platform software (Mastodon especially) consumes vastly more compute resources than the Pleroma family. I haven’t tried self-hosting Lemmy yet. YMMV.
We need more peer to peer hosting
That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don’t want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.
If only there was a way to charge per visit. Something like a digital billboard.
The server I subscribe to is completely transparent about their costs and displays how much lead time they have at their current spend. Per-user server cost is about $5 per year per paying user (as in, users that pay to keep the server running put in about $5, and there are many freeloaders). The admin to my knowledge doesn’t make any money on his labor.
To make $5/user in ads per year at a CPC of $0.38 or a CPM of $6 (twitter prices, which is being pretty generous for something as small as Lemmy) would mean I’d receive 833 ads per year. An ad runs until it’s CPM is hit, which means some of those ads would drag on for weeks until enough hapless fools clicked them. You might end up with one in five posts being an ad, leading to more adblocker use, which exacerbates your problem. It could end up being a significant cost to even deliver the ad content at that load.
This is all to make like $2k in hosting costs per year - imagine if you were trying to make a living running a Lemmy server, which people definitely will - it would be a hellscape. I’m happy to not deal with that.
.
It’s already there - it’s called hyphanet ( old freenet ). It works really well removing the need being always online but it’s not popular because of no mobile clients
@rglullis@communick.news my honest recommendation is to switch to the plain text only mode and disable file / media upload if it’s possible. Hosting plain text data is cheap. Let them share links only to their cdns, servers or ipfs for media
Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.
Yep. This is it. “Leftists” on Lemmy really love the. exploitation of free labor. As long as it’s DeCeNtrALiZeD exploitation.
“Oh c’mon man, it’s your hobby, right You’d do it anyway?”
Also, it wasn’t exactly just leftists, but also my leftist friends who were always asking for “friend prices” when I drove them around when I drove a taxi. Like… you guys are getting special service, and I’m your friend, you get to skip the hour of waiting and fighting other drunks in the taxi queue.
It also would’ve been different if there was the chances of favours in return.
So like people who could actually help with the labour or in something other way put in work, maybe they’d be okay with just covering the hosting costs, but modding a community isn’t exactly the same work as maintaining the soft- and hardware. Alone, I presume.
And also is the “hosting costs” just like the costs of the services for the hosting, or does it incorporate all the cost for electricity to run the equipment as well?
Is it lack of empathy or greed? I never really could figure that out. Feels like a bit of both.
It sounds like he doesn’t have any business hosting the site if he lacks the technical acumen to do it well.
Technical acumen?
You do realise things don’t happen just because you know how to do them? You still actually have to do them.
Yes. He doesn’t have the knowledge to be able to do it.
So youre saying if he just knew how to do it, he wouldn’t actually need to do it?
I know how to build a medieval castle with a moat and I’d have the technical acumen to build large sustainable hydroponic gardens there as well.
So why is it that I don’t have a castle, when I know how to build one?
Yes. You don’t have to build a castle. You guys are acting like this is some abstract science and not a well solved problem.
You’re saying he doesn’t need to do any work, that all thr work will just do itself, as long as he knows how it’s supposed to be done.
You don’t think maintaining a Mastodon instance takes any active input from the person maintaining the instance? Just knowing how to do it is enough to set up all the hardware and software required?
Sounds rather magical to me. Please explain
No one has said he doesn’t have to do work. Lie more.
If he doesn’t know how and doesn’t have the means to do something he shouldn’t be doing it. End of story.
This thread is about how people aren’t willing to cover the costs when labour is included.
Then you comment with “if he had more technical acumen, he wouldn’t need to do [the labour that people are unwilling to pay for]”.
He does know how. He’s saying he doesn’t have the means, because either he has to spend his time working full time, leaving no time for the labour people are unwilling to pay for, or people pay for the labour they’re unwilling to pay for, giving him the means, in which he will be able to do it, because he already has the knowledge.
Kinda how if someone gave me a huge plot of land, a quarry, and a billion dollars, I’d have no you’ve building a castle. But since I only know how to build one and don’t have the land, resource or time to labour a few hundred years building a castle bymeself, I’m not able to build a castle, but it’s not because I don’t know how to.
Maybe some reading comprehension or writing practice would do you good?
If he has more technical acumen he wouldn’t be struggling with it. If he doesn’t have the ability or means to run a server he shouldn’t run a server. Simple as that.
So you would do if for free?
Because you said you do that for a living. Meaning people pay you for the time you work on these things.
Have you any idea how costly that time is to your employer? That’s rhetorical, ofc you don’t.
Would you do go to work if it didn’t cover your rent?
You have admitted it does take some work. It doesn’t just happen, right.
So what is it you’re trying to say?
If he had your skills, he’d work for free? You would do the amount of work required, for free?
You’re just an arrogant dick who didn’t read the thread and said stupid shit. Simple as that.
Stop with the shrooms or liquor mate, they are not good for ya
Haven’t had shrooms probably about since you were in diapers.
And I don’t drink liquor.
But hey, thanks for the input.
Maybe it’s just dementia then, could happen to anyone of us with age
Oh no, you’re just not reading the thread properly and going along with that other fool.
How about you actually read the thread instead of leaving snarky comments.
Children should be seen and not heard.
No seriously the comment just made zero sense whatsoever. Felt like maybe pointing it out a little too directly. sorry for the additional suggestions of alcohol consumption
I mean nothing to be ashamed of, it happens to the best of us
I remember posting some shit on edibles like a couple of months ago? Was pretty hard to formulate coherent words. so that experience definitely reminds me of your comment
Oh hunny.
I’m sure there’s lots of things that don’t make sense to you.
Would you like me to simplify it for you, to make it easier for you understand, as it seems you’re one of the people who can’t control their drug use and may have actually fried their (already tiny to begin with) brain?
How is this a response to what you replied to?
“Hosting and labor costs money”
“So it’s a lack of technical acumen” -you
What?
It shouldn’t cost that much money. You should be able to host all of that and run it extremely cheap. This is what I do for a living. I’m telling you the person struggling is not equipped for the job. They have not done the prerequisite research or work to do what they are doing. Rather than leaning they are asking the community to foot the bill of their ignorance.
This is the type of mess that gets a team fired and me brought in to clean up amateur hour.
Read again, he is not asking to pay the server bills. It’s 1400€ (so, less than $0,10/active user/month) and he got it fully covered.
You can cut that 5x. You can cut that 10x. You can cut that 100x. It doesn’t matter. You can bet that if he brought down the prices to zero there would still be people saying “why are you asking for money then, it doesn’t cost you anything to run it!” and at the end of the month, he will still be short to make rent.
No, if 140€ a month breaks his bank he shouldn’t be hosting a server that costs 140€.
If I had an apartment and a landlord charged me 1400€ for a fix that cost 140€ he would be a buffoon.
Stop accepting incompetence just because he asked nicely. If he doesn’t have the technical skills to run a server he shouldn’t be running a server. It’s as simple as that.
Well, it’s very easy to be the armchair expert and say how much better you’d do it. It’s another thing entirely to actually do it. You are free to prove how smart and competent you are by showing him how to do better.
In any case, it’s irrelevant to the discussion. Like I said, if people are only giving him the money to cover the hardware costs, even if it was brought down the cost to zero he would still be working for free to all the 16k users of the instance.
This is what I do for a living you clown.
Ah, are you saying you don’t want to do this for free?
I’ll show him how to do it for free. Gave him reach out.
Seems like bad friends, whatever the political preferences are
Leveraging connections is both very human and of variable social acceptability depending on a lot of circumstances.
What would actually make them a bad friend is not being willing to return the favor.
Oh they were, yes, you’re 100% correct.
If providing a completely voluntary service is too much of a personal burden, the solution is to stop doing it. No one is being exploited, all relationships on Lemmy and Mastadon are completely voluntary by design.
Personally I don’t mind the idea of Lemmy embracing a syndicalist financial model or something of that nature but you’re simply spouting a bunch of entitled nonsense.
It perfectly fits into some commies dream idea of everyone doing their work for them, for free. Especially the revolution one
It is really ironic. Some kind of failure of the education system no doubt.
I don’t think you understand what a volunteer service is
I understand it pretty well. What I don’t understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on “volunteers”.
In a sibling comment, you say “if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it”. Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?
We are not talking about any small-time instance. It’s the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn’t that a sign that this is not sustainable?
Using the site, interacting with it and participating is providing service. Without those people there would be no content. Showing up is providing service.
Is it really?
Do you think it’s quantifiable?
I can go and say “my work as an admin is worth $XX,XXX/month, so this is how much I’d like to get paid to do it”. Now, some people will agree with it and pay for it. Some will not, and will look for some cheaper alternative.
If more admins went to on to adopt a similar approach and stipulated first how much their work is worth before even setting up an instance and if users went on to refuse the offer, what would they do?
Can you go around and say “my work as an user of Lemmy (or Reddit, or LinkedIn) is worth $YY per post, or $ZZ,ZZZ per month, and this is how I’d like to get paid to do it?”
Will anyone take you on your proposal?
And if admins refused to accept your offer, what do you think they would do?
As a data point: I may have stopped the alien.top mirroring bots, but I am still running them locally to browse Reddit content. To this day, the niche communities I used to sub there have more interesting content than anything here. So don’t think that whatever we are posting here is worth anything.
On reddit, the picture was pretty clear: admins are being paid, so your average commenter is volunteering the content, not to talk about the free (or power trip sponsored) work the mods are doing. And of course with the way reddit treated it’s contributors, there was huge animosity towards certain admins. I don’t see the participants here riding any more ‘free’ in terms of making this place work. The difference is that the admin is contributing money, instead of getting paid.
I can get behind a campaign for temporarily funding hosting costs, but that probably would not include rent or pay for the admin. It feels the main problem is rooted in our economy somewhere, but this is also something of a ‘put your own oxygen mask on first’ scenarios.
It is frustrating that someone who does such an amazing thing for the common good is struggling to get a fraction of a Zach Braff indiegogo project. You are also doing a good thing by spreading the message, but the pressure on this donation almost alienates me. Without knowing much about server instances, I imagine there are less fortunate alternatives, like moving the hosts to someone close by, outsourcing certain roles to trusted folk while the admin finds the time and money to fund their hobby again.
I hope I’m not coming over as too cold, it just feels like you are trying to solve a way bigger problem than we have. We need the instances run by volunteers. Would the admin be happier if their project died, or temporarily be handed over (if this is possible at all)? What’s better for the thousands of users? Is it fair to the admin? Shit no. Can they get the funding to pay for their hobby? Maybe. Is it fair if they are using the instance as leverage?
I think that the crux of the matter is about whether or not we see this as “just a hobby” or if we really see an investment in the Fediverse as the best alternative that we have for an open (I am not going to say “free” to avoid confusion) web that can take power away from Big Tech and back to the people.
Why? Are you going to tell me that the 98% of non-paying users are struggling so much with their finances that they can not afford to pay a couple of bucks per month to an admin?
If the numbers were reversed and we had 2% of the people saying “sorry, I really can not afford this. Can I have access still?” I would be a lot more understanding. Hell, the number could go up to even 20% and I wouldn’t mind opening a few free accounts…
But 98%? I can bet that the most if not all find a way to pay for Netflix, or Spotify, or their games but $2.50 a month is suddenly too much for ninety-and-eight percent of the people?
Really not sure about that on Lemmy…
Btw, just gave 10$ to my instance today
Or their games. Or their booze/drugs/cigarettes. Or their whatever they spend their money on without questioning the one providing the goods why they want to charge for it.
Good on you! Now, let’s get that to become the norm for everyone else.
You see people here running 5 years old phones with custom ROMs, 10 years laptops on minimalist distros
Pirating every show or movie they watch. I really don’t think the average Lemmy user is a frivolous spender
Once again you are using points on the extreme end of the distribution curve and trying to pass it as the median case.
Also: pirating is an act of moral rebellion, not of lack of means to afford the shitty product offered by the movie industry
Just taking into account the platform audience.
I wasn’t surprised by the Pixelfed Kickstarter success, as IG is much more popular than Reddit. Text based forums are a much smaller audience.
Love the enthusiasm! If anything gives me faith in the world, it’s that we have the Gnu crowd. I think it’s hard not to fall in love with it in the gloom of the late-freemium era.
Stop rummaging in other people’s wallet. Money as it is, is a very sensitive topic. Also further down in this thread you bring in addiction, alienating further people.
Reddit is having trouble monetizing, yet you blame druggies from this very community for similar problems we’re facing. What is your point? Where are you going? What do you want?
We have no tools against capitalism besides pushing a friggin ‘buy me a coffee’ button anywhere possible. Maybe Copyleft for those who’d proudly piss in the headwind. If you wanna make the system better, that’s great! It just feels like you are lashing out at the community instead of empathizing. Broadcasting ideals is alright if you only want to vent about it and not actually look for solutions.
Can you imagine me not contributing monetarily but wanting the best for all of us? You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here, but the things you are campaigning for go straight against the spirit of the movement. Work with what we have to make shit better for all (while somehow hardening against capitalism).
My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.
They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.
Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.
Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.
Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.
If I am, then the discussion should be “how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?” instead of this “you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing.”
Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:
“pay it forward” systems, where those who can afford more pay for those who can not. Let them become responsible for who to invite. (I have implemented this at Communick, by the way, and so far I had only two people paying for others.)
Selling ad space for ethical businesses. Back in 2007 there used to be a network of bloggers who did not want to pollute their pages with adSense, so they got together and created a system where companies would pay $5k to $10k to have one slot and all bloggers committed to display this banner during the whole month. Something like that could be done here as well, if “making money” wasn’t such a capital sin.
focus on making this normie-friendly. Stop with the political bickering and organize the topic-specific instances (which I already offered for other admins), use them to attract a larger audience so that we have more “actually I can pay a few bucks per month” crowd to dilute the “I am anti-establishment but I can not afford to fight against it” crowd that seems to dominate so far.
Simple solution. Mimic what paid online news does. Paywall, but like don’t raise the perimeter anytime someone finds a ladder. Like we have here with the linked archive posts. Definitely a good way to keep out the heavy commies.
Go for it! But you won’t get me to uninstall my adblocker until I am convinced ads are any good to me. Like not the piece of shit manipulations that treat me as a skinner box. Many good examples of incorporating ads into shows, but with dignity and taste and a clear indication that it is an ad.
Also, if the admin deserves compensation for their time, why don’t I get a pretty penny for this? Sure, the admin hosts and supports the frame, but they could twirl their short hairs all night without the buzz.
I could easily write an essay connecting the rise of populism and the fall of civic society to our loss of real journalism, and another 1000-word post arguing that paywalls are just a bad band-aid trying to cover the deep wound caused by eyeball chasing “infotainment”.
These “fake” paywalls are just an attempt from the news publishers to have both ways and make revenue both from the paying customers and the ones that may be okay with ads.
People love to hate the Brave browser, but their system pays 70% of the revenues to the end user. If you manage to convince more people to use it, it would be perfect. End users would get some $ from accepting the ads and they could kick some of that back to the sites they wish to support. The whole economy could grow and everyone would have their incentives aligned.
You know what the problem is? People were looking at the 2-5 bucks of crypto tokens that they would get and instead of using them to stimulate the economy they would just hang on them for the speculation of profit. Individual greed and penny-pinching turned one of the most viable alternatives into another tool for crypto grifters.
People are very willing to donate other’s time
The core argument here is should there be an expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs.
Personally, if an instance is run off of donations, then it’s a nice to have. As an admin, you shouldn’t have that expectation. If you no longer want to volunteer your time, then don’t. Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
I’m also okay with paid instances and admins trying to make a reasonable salary or even making additional profit as long as it’s transparent to the users. It’s their choice to charge, it’s our choice to pay.
Overall, instances should be run by a group of volunteers, not a single individual. Otherwise, the long term viability of the instance is questionable.
this is how it was in the BBS days. We volunteered our time to run the boards because we enjoyed it and had the hardware. I covered the telco costs and electricity because i could, and enjoyed providing the space for my friends. When it stopped being feasible you passed the torch. There’s always someone else with the interest and the desire and the means to be in charge for a while!
There were pay bbs’ and i just didn’t use em cuz i was already at my limit paying for two phone lines and hardware.
I don’t mind pitching in now and then but I don’t feel like i owe any of the admins anything beyond gratitude.
Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn’t be treated as a disposable entity who don’t need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.
It’s a “I want you to want to do the dishes” kind of thing.
Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying “you know what? You don’t want to help me, so I don’t owe your lot anything”.
Are those Lemmy instances, or other software like Mastodon?
Mastodon because it is the largest number of instances and users, but the principle is the same. It hasn’t happened with Lemmy yet because this subset of the Fediverse is ridiculously small compared to Mastodon/Pixelfed
I’ve also heard that Lemmy is cheaper to run than Mastodon
jlai.lu/comment/13035055
You of all people here should know that the cost of running the service is not the real issue. Even if Mastodon takes 3x as much hardware to run as Lemmy, the cost of hardware is still pennies per user.
You are the one who brought the size of the platform as a reason for costs not being an issue here compared to Mastodon, so I assumed you meant that having more users would mean more costs for the admins?
Or do you mean that with more instances, there is a higher chance of some admin having issues covering the costs?
The latter.
Mastodon is also an ultra-heavyweight in terms of compute resources it consumes per daily active user served. This is one reason (among multiple) that I would never run Mastodon as an ActivityPub microblogging instance.
Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?
Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn’t designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.
I’ve seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don’t have a strong caching system.
So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.
Well it’s not easy. They are unsung heroes. They aren’t the only volunteers in this world. Do you think the people in our communities volunteering to pick up trash or people at homeless shelters volunteering are requesting compensation or a pat on the back? Honestly, there’s more than enough instances and volunteers to host those instances.
And just to clarify, I do think our admins deserve a pat on the back and donations. I am eternally grateful, but they shouldn’t resent their community for not donating to them.
My local Madison insurance is forming a steering committee and has created an LLC. (I’m a member of the committee.) We will solicit donations, because mostly it has been one guy paying for a small regional instance of about 100 AU.
We think of it like public broadcasting, like PBS. I will be happy to kick in a few dollars per month to pay for it. We have contests, online meetups, and other fun. It’s not just Mastodon, it’s an active regional online community, and it’s worth it.
(I also donate to my Lemmy instance, because it’s worth it too!)
Is it an Australian instance? whats the domain?
100 active users, sorry
I love this.
This is one of the things that make me think the current “fediverse” isn’t going to be its final form. It’s a good stepping stone, but users and communities being locked to a single instance will become a bugbear sooner rather than later.
@stux@mstdn.social
I can send you the full 274 on the 1st but I cannot use PayPal. If we can figure out a different way for me to get you the money hmu
Their post listed 5 other options.
Jesus Christ I know I need glasses but they’re RIGHT THERE in my face too. Thank you lmfao
@remindme@mstdn.social 5 days
@JustAnotherKay Ok, I will remind you on Tuesday Apr 1, 2025 at 11:11 PM UTC.
@JustAnotherKay Here is your reminder!
No worries, shoulda gone to Specsavers ;)
I just went through seven motherboard, three power supplies and two i9-10980xe CPU's to find a stable combination of hardware for my instance, so forgive me if I'm not too keen on paying for someone else's.