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Did they share any receipts or official documents to back up their claims?
They have a really good racket going on and want to make sure people keep giving them way more money than is necessary. It's simply not true that Infosec.Exchange requires $5000/month to operate unless they're doing something very wrong or just straight up lying.
Money brings out the worst in people. Don't let the useful idiots bring you down because there are more of them.
We failed the instance operators if they need to lie about money. What we need to insure is that those people can both run the instance and live a live worth of envy from the money provided by the supporters. Meaning any money above the costs is good money. Any money below the margin of live worthy of envy is not enough money. The line is not at being able to pay for hosting. The line is at live worthy of envy.
We failed the instance operators if they need to lie about money.
Wtf...
I swear, a fool and his money are soon parted.
Like I said, money brings out the worst in people.
You're free to provide evidence to prove me wrong, or you can keep trying to distract and prove me right.
You gotta love the transparency.
Very interesting article! I have immense respect for jerry@infosec.exchange, he was one of the first people I found on the fediverse, and it's no wonder why, he's revered quite highly by others as being a generous and kind admin.
I do want to point out one thing, and that is that Mastodon has some design decisions that make it rather resource and storage intensive.
There are oodles of lighter software out there, some with even more features than Mastodon, and some with less. For example, snac.bsd.cafe (https://snac.bsd.cafe/) runs on Snac, which is fast as hell.
I am going to guess that a not insignificant portion of Jerry's bill is caching assets. Mastodon likes to save everything it encounters, videos, images, avatars, everything... forever (though I imagine this is customisable). Most likely the assets are viewed a handful of times in one day and never seen again... but you'll pay to store it forever!
One of the ways that this could improve in the future is that we're working on a notional caching service as a future Fediverse Auxiliary Service Provider, so that this kind of content could be shared between small groups of instances that chose to use it.
It doesn’t store media forever that is routinely cleaned and configurable in the administration settings for the instance. The content cache, which is database storage used for the text and meta-data of posts is more typically an issue over time because this requires commands to be run on the server to free up space, which many people do not do. https://fedihost.co/blog/slug/managing-mastodon-storage
Most likely the assets are viewed a handful of times in one day and never seen again… but you’ll pay to store it forever!
This is exactly the thing that should optimized immediately. Store relevant content. Delete after it is not relevant. Fetch it back if it is relevant again.
This is exactly the thing that should optimized immediately.
If there's a word that does not go well with Mastodon, it's "immediately"
lol
Happy cake day btw!
Things would improve by a lot in Mastodon if they implemented separate storage engines between local and remote resources. Then instance admins could have a way to host, e.g, local resources on their own infrastructure but push all remote instances to some "shared cache", based on IPFS/torrent/TahoeLAFS.
- There is a lack of payment options. A lot of people that use the Fediverse use it because it is the only Free Software platform that there is. And those people would be the most reliant of it to keep existing. Because for them to go back to Facebook or Twitter is not even an option. Yet those same people cannot donate because donations require things that are not libre. I really hope that more options will appear to support as many donation channels as possible in as many libre projects as possible. So those people that are the most passionate about the whole thing will be able to support it too.
Realistically, how many people object to using a payment processor online on the grounds of "it's not FOSS"?
I know a pretty substantial amount of those people. But most likely they will not object to it. They will just see that the option is not there and move on. They are kind of already used to not seeing an option. Many of them don't even look for it, or even think there could be one. Only maybe FSF has donation options for those people.
What is a "substantial amount of people", relatively to the total amount of people in the Fediverse that a) are already here, b) do not object to using stripe and c) still don't donate anyway?
Anybody who is on something like #fsf on IRC, or who helps to organize the Libre Planet. Or people who buy computers from the Ministry of Truth. Aka people that are as serious about this ( if not more serious ) than Richard Stallman.
Just to add thing, I personnaly don't donate regurlarly because I am hosting services from my pocket. Not of his scale for sure but still cost me an average of 30-50€ a month. May be it is a marginal so that why they didn't think about this answer about not donating.
Jerry is a blessing
Thank you @jerry@infosec.exchange