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 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.
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.
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.
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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.
Yeah host-ers on the fediverse are not making money that’s for sure.
I self host a number of fedi systems. Mastodon used to be the most “costly” in terms of CPU and storage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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9$/month to send toots? Really?
I love how the first admin that reminds immediately says talk not working 32 hours a week lol
Does this apply to lemmy 1/1?
Thank you! I think in the end it all converges on the same point: support your instances if you like them online
Indeed!
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.
Yes, and it’s a fair point as well.
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?
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.
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.
Paging @[email protected] 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.
