Lol, I run multiple FOSS services online, two of which have thousands of MAUs. I consider myself lucky to be even covering the hardware costs at this point. I would love to even make an extra 500 Eur per month for myself given the amount of time I spend doing sysadmin, automation, PR, development and just being an active part of the communities.

We really need to change in what people consider valuable and how little actually is needed to help. Like literally, all you need to do is spare 1$ per month on your social media that is your primary home. If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.

[–] TonyOstrich@lemmy.world 11 points 1 day ago

I don't know how it could possibly be implemented, but I wish there was some kind of application or token that ran on my devices that would track how much I visited or used various pieces of FOSS software and services and then at the end of every month would pay each one from a predefined amount of money I set for how much I think I can afford for all of it. Maybe before actually sending the payments it generates a report stating the breakdown and allowing me to tweak the percentages.

Likely a privacy nightmare even if entirely locally running, but would be sweet.

[–] rglullis 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.

I completely agree in principle. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority (like 98% of them) don't do that, and they just expect to keep using things for free, until whoever is backing the thing gets broke and/or burned out.

And when it happens, they just move on to the next instance. Rinse, repeat. Like locusts.

[–] db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 1 day ago

The things is, there's plenty of people who are willing to open their wallet for their services, they just prefer paying corporations, instead of donating to FOSS.

[–] wiki_me@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 day ago

meta makes 156B per year, assuming 3.98B users per year (average monthly active users). that's about 39$ revenue per user per year and 3.2$ per user per month.

If you want to make that kind of money, i think they only realistic option adding ads with an option to pay to disable the ads. i never saw a open source project raises that kind of money with fundraising. even then i am not sure it will work because i think i read a report that people who block ads basically don't read them when they can't block so those ads will make no money.

[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 20 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:

Twitter wanted $10
I know about 1% of users donate
I like having an independent instance run by people I feel ideologically aligned with.

For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.

I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It's so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I'm still going to pay for independent social media because it's worth it.

[–] rglullis 4 points 2 days ago

Great, unfortunately you are in the minority. Seems like only around 2% of the users donate to their instances, and even the ones that do are covering only the hardware costs.

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 31 points 2 days ago

Yeah host-ers on the fediverse are not making money that's for sure.

I self host a number of fedi systems. Mastodon used to be the most "costly" in terms of CPU and storage.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 22 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (24 children)

That seems super expensive, and/or some bad math like 4 users on a paid server.

Edit: gets accused of gaslighting by OP... Stay classy! Still Super expensive BTW.

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[–] atro_city@fedia.io 9 points 2 days ago

9$/month to send toots? Really?

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