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.
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.
Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running
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, $1 a month.
I didn't realize there was patrons for lemmy instances
Shit aint free.
I mean when we were over at (the bad place), people were literally donating monthly to pay for server costs. (the bad place) in the early days was basically one giant instance.
except it didnt have a working video player. for-fucking-ever.
so I donate a bit to my mortal enemy @desalines and a bit to lemmy.world to keep the project going. Maybe 5 bucks a month between the two?
Context for people reading this: https://feddit.org/post/2600584
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
Recent discussion I had with rglullis: https://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. https://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.
By the way: 2 EUR per year would be enough if every active user would donate that but they don’t
Indeed. Have you thought about promoting this in an announcement post?
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".
The list of statements where you have the chance to share your values is still unanswered.
I answered here 5 days ago: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17470674
Which, for some reason, didn't make it to your instance? https://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 https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17470674
No, thanks. I will not engage in any further discussion with you until you explicitly answer those statements.
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.
I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
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.
Or we could drop the whole idea of depending on "donations" and understand that admins like 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.
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.
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 :)
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.
@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.
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?
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".
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?
@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
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