Please, tell me how “paying for hardware costs is enough”…
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.
unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating
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.
https://communick.news/ sidebar
6 users/month
10 users/6 monthsAnd 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.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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!)
I love this.
Is it an Australian instance? whats the domain?
100 active users, sorry
expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs
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.
Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
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”.
have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month
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
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.
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:
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)
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”.
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.
@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
No worries, shoulda gone to Specsavers ;)
@remindme@mstdn.social 5 days
@JustAnotherKay Ok, I will remind you on Tuesday Apr 1, 2025 at 11:11 PM UTC.
@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?
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?
- Putting themselves through the trouble to set up an instance for themselves?
- Pay a professional to do it for them?
- Go to Reddit?
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?
- Find other sources of “content”?
- Pay other professionals to generate content for them?
- Go To Reddit?
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.
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?
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.
We need the instances run by volunteers.
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 $2.50 a month is suddenly too much for ninety-and-eight percent of the people?
I can bet that the most if not all find a way to pay for Netflix, or Spotify
Really not sure about that on Lemmy…
Btw, just gave 10$ 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.
Btw, just gave 10$ to my instance today
Good on you! Now, let’s get that to become the norm for everyone else.
“just a hobby”
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.
Reddit is having trouble monetizing
They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.
We have no tools against capitalism.
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.
You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.
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.
-
People are very willing to donate other’s time
Yep. This is it. “Leftists” on Lemmy really love the. exploitation of free labor. As long as it’s DeCeNtrALiZeD exploitation.
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.
“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.
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.
Seems like bad friends, whatever the political preferences are
Oh they were, yes, you’re 100% correct.
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.
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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?
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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.
Technical acumen?
You do realise things don’t happen just because you know how to do them? You still actually have to do them.
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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?
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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?
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.
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’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.
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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
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.
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 :)
Removed by mod
Shit happens, unexpected costs come up.
It’s not like there’s massive global financial instability going on…
How about minding your own business?
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.
