I prefer good faith discussions please. I love the Fediverse and love what it can be long term. The problem is that parts of the culture want nothing to do with financial aspect. Many are opposed to ads, memberships, sponsorships etc The “small instances” response does nothing to positively contribute to the conversation. There are already massive instances and not everyone wants to self host. People are concerned with larger companies coming to the Fedi but these beliefs will drive everyday users to those instances. People don’t like feeling disposable and when you hamstring admins who then ultimately shut down their instances that’s exactly how people end up feeling. There has to be an ethical way of going about this. So many people were too hard just to be told “too bad” “small instances” I don’t want to end up with a Fediverse ran by corporations because they can provide stability.
I dont think you are right that most people dont want to donate. All big fediverse instances are funded by users. Every user may not want to pay the few cents that it costs to host the instance for them but there are enough users that donate $10+ to cover hosting costs for the other users.
All big fediverse instances are funded by users.
This isn’t true for a lot of them if you actually take a look. Consider the top 10 instances according to https://fediverse.observer/list
- mstdn.jp, pawoo.net, mastodon.cloud are run out of pocket (by the same owner (!!!)).
- misskey.io is partially funded by ads., registrations from non-Japanese IPs were also closed shortly after the Musk takeover.
- Funding for mastodon.social and mastodon.online is co-mingled with the funding for Mastodon the software project
- baraag.net barely has the funds to secure enough capacity for the number of users it serves (registrations have been closed for the past year)
- The admin of mstdn.social was apparently short on rent this month? (!!!)
- daystorm and pravda don’t count because their numbers are spoofed
- mastodon.world and mas.to can count themselves as lucky enough to be truly user-funded and (seemingly?) sustainable.
OP may not be good at phrasing things, but their concerns are completely legitimate. Almost ALL of the biggest instances are unsustainable on their own or have had to make compromises in order to stay online.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I have two friends that can use some spare space on my NAS. If I ever randomly pull the plug on that, they got pretty little to complain about tbh, short of me not giving any prior notice which would be nice since they personally know me. Since mastodon/lemmy providers don’t even have that, I also wouldn’t fault them for not giving such notice.
🤷
Does it matter? Not really, IMO. Social media as a whole is a scourge, and plenty of the bigger sites with corporations behind them are run at a negative, so there seems to be no good financial solution in sight so far. If you could just collect a few donations or run some ads, you bet the corporations would long have done that and be far in the black. But they’re not, so that hints at an inherent issue of usercount vs perceived per-user-value that makes users unwilling to spend on the service they’re using.
Well, ultimately mastodon/lemmy are hobbyist projects. They would naturally count as “provided as is, with no guarantees”.
I don’t know about Lemmy, but Mastodon the software project is most certainly not a hobbyist project, blowing it off as one is just tone deaf. It’s a real non-profit company with actual developers on an actual payroll. mastodon.social and .online are real expenses on the balance sheet of that non-profit. pawoo.net was started by pixiv, a for-profit company, but changed ownership several times and is now owned by Sujitech LLC (along with mstdn.jp and mastodon.cloud). The owner of misskey.io is also in the process of forming a company.
Yes, they are “provided as is, with no guarantees” but the people who run them are completely and sincerely invested in their sustainability as more than just hobby projects.
I didn’t state that it was my opinion. It was three separate polls that asked about donations. The second highest was always the have not donated and will not donate
None of the big fediverse instances are in the black when you account for the cost of labor from admins and moderators.
I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time. I’m pretty sure there are instances that pay admins and contribute to the dev team upstream. The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.
I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time.
Then you can not say that these instances are well-funded. Computers and electricity is peanuts when compared to the cost of having real people doing moderation, dealing with moderation issues, etc.
The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.
You are going at this backwards.
There is plenty of work to be done on the fediverse, but the people doing it can not do it full-time because users don’t pay or support them.
Firstly I did not say that the instances were “well-funded”. The discussion is about sustainability and the main on going cost is server hosting. Most big instances can cover server costs by donations and still have thousands in the coffer. These instances also have people that are happy to volunteer their time to moderate and resolve sysadmin related problems that arise. This has been the case for many years and I dont think we will run out of contributors as the fediverse grows.
Secondly, I may be misinterpreting you but it seems to me that you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance. So we should look at an example of a group that does both. If we take a look at Mastodon.social we can see from their annual report they pulled in 327k euros in donations. Operating costs were 127k and personal costs were 80k. The staff are freelancers and work as required are paid with rates ranging from 50/h to 200/h. This includes developers and UX designers for multiple platforms.
Since Lemmy is quite new and the project is growing rapidly it is experience growing pains. These issues require the sys admins in each instance to do work to resolve the issue and maintain the instance. As the software matures I expect the work required to maintain the instance will decrease. I expect that instances will need to use volunteer labor while they are small but will be able to pay staff once they grow large enough. I do not expect moderators will ever be paid because that would be very expensive and a nightmare to manage. Small instances are cheap to run and run into less issues requiring admins to step in.
Going by what I outlined about I believe that the fediverse is sustainable for large servers and small. I dont think we will ever reach a stage where the only servers are corporate servers sustained by ads and investment. I dont think OP provides enough evidence that donations are not enough to sustain the fediverse.
personal costs were 80k.
And that is for their two-full time developers. Do you realize how low that is?
you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance.
Take any service that you use and paid for: do you know exactly how much of the bill is for each role?
When you pay for a movie ticket, do you know the exact split of how much goes to each person involved in the production?
It makes no sense to try to separate the costs here. At the end of the day, what really determines the viability of the whole enterprise is a simple balance sheet. If the consumers are giving enough money to satisfy the people involved, great. If not, there will either be someone getting exploited or there will be no product.
Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs? If it makes no sense to breakdown the costs then there is no point in debating that the donation model is unsustainable because we can look at history and see that the fedidiverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs?
Because that’s all they have on payroll, full-time. Gargron and ClearlyClaire are the only employees of Mastodon GmbH. Gargron is reportedly taking 30k€/year as a salary. This is laughably low. I’m not saying it to dismiss Eugen, but to demonstrate how little the most prominent developers in the Fediverse are being rewarded by their work.
the fediverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
Let’s drop the hopium. The Fediverse is not growing. We saw occasional waves of people coming due to Musk’s take over of Twitter, but few of them stayed around. Lemmy had over 100k MAU in July, and now we are at ~36k MAU.
“Instances continue to run fine” is absolutely not true. Lemmy is looking a bit more stable nowadays, but a lot of it is simply due to the fact that there is less activity now and because the LW admins are shutting down / defederating from any instance that sneeze at their way with a bit more activity. If we look at the Mastodon side which is a bit more mature:
- Mastodon’s instances shutting down because admins got tired of the abuse and entitlement from its users is a weekly occurrence.
- Newsie.social (an instance with 20k registered users) was on the brink of closing down but got saved on the last minute because it soft-merged with journa.host
- Go to /r/Mastodon and you will see stories of instances that disappeared without notice.
Hmm. Does this mean that it’s expensive to run this whole Fediverse thing and that the money is running out?
It means that many servers have shutdown due to costs. That there will be more users due to Twitters incompetence a due to platforms adopting ActivityPub down the line. This will have significant strain on resources, remaining with only a donation option is dangerous
That’s like post #10 I see from random users proposing we should somehow run ads or whatever to finance big instances.
I haven’t seen a single statement going in that direction from big instances themselves. None of those posts referred to anything.
Is it just overconcerned people worrying about things which are not their problem? I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles. As long as they don’t speak up, I would conclude we don’t have to worry. The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough. Did they ask for advice, do they need advice?
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
I think we should try to keep it nice, and not revert to capitalist enshittification prematurely, without any necessity.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy. Maybe some do run ads, who knows. You can join them if you like, or host your own.
Show the problem exists which you try to solve. Point to instances who struggle financially, who consider running ads, something like that.
I assume people who can run a big instance would notice if they are getting into financial troubles.
There are no “big instances” in the Threadiverse. The largest one (LW) has less than 13k active MAU. These numbers are ridiculously low and offer no real stress to the system. Let’s 10x this number and see what starts happening.
We currently have more than 1000 instances on Lemmy.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU. And the bigger instances (LW, Beehaw) are balkanizing the Fediverse: trigger-happy with the defederation buttons, avoiding any instance that can bring “unwanted” activity, etc. Even if other instances start making experiments, they will only be interesting if they happen out in the open.
The current model (whatever it is) seems to work well enough.
Does it? From my perspective, we have a small group of people who are just messing around with things that they can run themselves, a slightly larger group of people who are discontent with reddit and wanted an alternative, but very few people who actually care about an alternative and are willing to put substantial resources to help with development and to accelerate adoption.
Maybe it’s that people are so used to being forced to see ads and pay half their wage for insulin that they cannot imagine nice things exist.
People are not forced to see ads. Ad blockers exist. Which in a way is actually a problem. People managed to enjoy sites and blocking ads, so they got used to the idea that no ads + free access is an universal possibility and the natural state of social networks.
As for price: I’ve been offering plans for Mastodon access that cost $0.50/month/user on communick. I’ve had exactly ZERO people on this plan.
My conclusion: it’s not the price point. It’s just that people don’t want to pay for social media.
The top 10 instances account for 74% of MAU.
Yes, because even with federation it is inherently advantageous for a user of a social platform to be among the largest pool of people they can identify, to make random stumbling into discussions and groups as likely as possible.
It’s a weird thing where we want the federation to provide a network of smallest scale platforms, yet we do this for social media, where the experience is naturally best when it starts with a single giant platform you filter down not an ocean of individual bits you have to glue together.
I’m guessing you are not old enough to remember how the internet used to work before Facebook? This idea that walled gardens are somewhat better is a meme that needs to die.
The web itself is the giant platform. Ease of discovery is not an inherent property of centralized networks, it’s just that we haven’t had built the proper tools to make this work in a decentralized manner.
To make my case: what killed RSS was not that it was difficult to discover new blogs. What killed RSS was that it couldn’t be monetized by the publishers when they started using it. What made Twitter so successful was that it let those publishers to have some sense of control over the distribution. Had we properly supported content creators with actual money instead of the promise of eyeballs, the internet would be a much better and healthier place than it is today.
Geezus. I’m old enough to remember how the Internet was before the Internet. Sorry. 😅
You however completely missed the point. Social media in its nature benefits from centralized approaches. As a use case. Independent of who operates it. Users have it easier the more central it is. It doesn’t need to be walled. Of course not. But it should be centralized.
But it should be centralized.
Again, I really don’t see why. Content/Peer discovery can all be made transparent for the user, addressing and distribution as well.
I see the benefit for those building the platforms which in turn make these networks more attractive to users, and I see how the overall cost of the whole system is lower if it is centralized (economies of scale and avoid redundancies), but I’m failing to see how (all else being equal) the users benefit from a centralized system over a distributed one.
The fact that you are on LW and I’m not does not stop us from doing anything on Lemmy that is possibly only on reddit. Why benefit would there be for me to join LW?
Like I said above, specifically for the “I want to socialize” use case of social media sites, there’s no upside to federation. It makes discovery harder, and a giant portion of what made Reddit so amazing was the random stumbling into things.
And yes, sure, federated systems can be made to more closely emulate such a centralized approach, but that’s why I said it that way: A centralized pool of social media content (for a given social media platform) is beneficial to the user, they can randomly stumble into topics and groups, and filter things down to what they desire.
In an ideal federated system, that is in turn exactly how the content would look for the user: They’d not even realize the content isn’t all on whatever instance they’re on, it’s fully transparent. Because that’s easier for the user. No matter how low the barrier to finding federated content is, there’s still no upside for the user having to take that step and go hunt for federated concept. From the perspective of the user, that is.
It’s not a big issue of course, but it does mean that by default, more users flock to where there are already more users.
I agree with your overall sentiment but am I crazy or is RSS more popular than ever?
Is it? Maybe in absolute numbers it has gone up, but I remember when established newspapers and journalists would write on their blog and have full-text feeds, while nowadays everything seems to be on substack/medium and the RSS feeds just puts out a link to the gated content.
If you include podcasts, which are delivered via RSS by definition, undoubtedly RSS is more popular than ever.
It’s a little disingenuous to do that though, so in this context we probably shouldn’t count it.
Have you considered that it isn’t the price but the subscription? Many people I know have a real aversion against subscription services with this constant threat of being cut off and arbitrary price increases.
I am pretty sure an up-front single “life-time” price would have more takers, even if such a promise is obviously still subject to many caveats.
Subscriptions have gotten a bad rep lately because of companies that try to turn a product (like a car and heated seats) into a “service”, but there is nothing inherently wrong/unfair about someone that provides a service that has occurring and constant costs based on usage.
Also, for those that want to have full control over their own identity, they can have their own managed server, which is still a bit expensive but will be made a lot cheaper with the next generation of fediverse services (like takahe and mitra) . Once that gets more mature, users would be able to bring their own domain and a service provider would be a commodity like an email hosting service. In the case where I can port account and my identity to different providers by simply changing a DNS record, the power will be fully in the hands of the people and there will be nothing for them to worry about.
