We need to make it easy to check the financial health of an instance. And things like costs and money made from donations should be visible, and rendered as progress bars or charts. So people would know when and to whom to donate.

[–] rglullis 1 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

These things would be good but they wouldn't change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly "funded" but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.

Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.

[–] blenderdumbass@lm.madiator.cloud 1 points 15 minutes ago

no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators

These need to be part of the report. We have to fund not just hardware, but good life ( worthy of envy ) of those people. If their lives aren't worthy of envy now, the fediverse isn't healthy and we need to donate more.