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.
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.
