Fediverse

I talked to Jerry and here is my interview: https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/clarifying_costs_of_running_the_fediverse_with_jerry_from_infosec.exchange

The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven't even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the "server" is a hive of users' computers all sharing the load? I'm a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?

Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.

I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.

The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I'd be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can't sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we've used for 100s of hours.

I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what's going on with the donated money.

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

I don't know if it's the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it's not clear I just hold my money.

But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially "user donations". For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don't think that's going to change as most people don't have that much disposable income anyway.

I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don't get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as "less centralized", truly decentralized model should be p2p. I've said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it's a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.

I think a model that the burden is smaller and more spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.

Also I take the chance to put up a critique on domain costs, it's not much, but it's part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don't know if there's any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.

Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.

Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server. They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day. Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook. They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event. They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.

Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.

Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I've managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that's my guess at least.

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.

Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.

Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.

Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else's?

ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they're using. Oh, the humanity.

@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?

If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?

start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.

what is so difficult here?