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Fediverse sustainability
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Fediverse
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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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And that is for their two-full time developers. Do you realize how low that is?
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.
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.
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:
With open source software you are always going to run into issues where a lot of the development work is done for free or as charity. You can say this is unsustainable but I use a lot of open source software and in many cases its almost as good or better than software by companies running around with budgets in the 100s of millions.
You can say the fediverse isnt growing and point to user decreases after peaks but the current active users are higher than they were before the peak and higher than they were a few years ago and thats growth. You point to one point where lemmy had 100k users and now it has 36k but before that it had less than 3k. Is that not growth? Think of how much money other companies spend to get 36k MAU and lemmy gets it through grassroots support.
In terms of instance instability you are right that instances can disappear without any notice and even with notice its not any better. With everyone having the ability to host and instance there are going to be many cases where people are not cut out for the task of long term server hosting I think everyone signing up should know that at some point their instance might disappear and be pointed towards established instance hosters. This is valid criticism and something that we can improve. The fediverse needs a way to backup our fediverse identity so we can move it around maybe some smart people are already working on this idk. Thenewsie.social example is interesting because it shows another advantage of the fedivese and distributed hosting. If something isnt working we can merge. I also looked at their expenses and they pay moderators and journalists which is cool. I checked and both instances seem to still be up and running racking in thousands in donations. I expect they will both still be here next year and the year after.
Its not like the fediverse is the only site that is prone to being shutdown out of nowhere. Even google cuts its services 1 year into running basically nuking all the time users spent on that service and giving them no alternative. At least if 99.99% of lemmy instances go down I can host my own. The amount of users affected by instances shutting down does not seem to be massive amount but maybe it can seem this way if you look on reddit since most people will go to the mastodon sub only to voice their complaints.
If the current model did not work I don't think we would have gotten this far. I would support an option for instances to be able to place ads but I also think its a bad path to go down and unnecessary.
Google is known for cutting free services when there is no direct revenue from the users and it was not profitable on its own. You are making my argument for me here.
Every popular FOSS product has either received itself investment from some corporation which wanted to profit from it, or it was financed by some large group who wanted to commoditize their complements.
"This far" in relation to what? Are you hoping to have the Fediverse as a viable alternative to everyone or are you feeling satisfied because it fulfills the needs of small niche? Do you want Lemmy to be like Linux, or do you want it to be like *BSD?
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