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.
personal costs were 80k.
And that is for their two-full time developers. Do you realize how low that is?
you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance.
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.
Where does it say the 80k is for their two devs?
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.
the fediverse is growing and instances continue to run fine.
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:
- Mastodon’s instances shutting down because admins got tired of the abuse and entitlement from its users is a weekly occurrence.
- Newsie.social (an instance with 20k registered users) was on the brink of closing down but got saved on the last minute because it soft-merged with journa.host
- Go to /r/Mastodon and you will see stories of instances that disappeared without notice.
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.
