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Fediverse sustainability (lemmy.ml)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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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.

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[–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

I dont count the cost of moderators and admins volunteering their time.

Then you can not say that these instances are well-funded. Computers and electricity is peanuts when compared to the cost of having real people doing moderation, dealing with moderation issues, etc.

The admin pay only covers the few hours a month they are doing admin work since there isnt enough work to do fulltime.

You are going at this backwards.

There is plenty of work to be done on the fediverse, but the people doing it can not do it full-time because users don't pay or support them.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Firstly I did not say that the instances were "well-funded". The discussion is about sustainability and the main on going cost is server hosting. Most big instances can cover server costs by donations and still have thousands in the coffer. These instances also have people that are happy to volunteer their time to moderate and resolve sysadmin related problems that arise. This has been the case for many years and I dont think we will run out of contributors as the fediverse grows.

    Secondly, I may be misinterpreting you but it seems to me that you are mixing development and testing work of the lemmy/mastodon/whatever software with hosting an instance. So we should look at an example of a group that does both. If we take a look at Mastodon.social we can see from their annual report they pulled in 327k euros in donations. Operating costs were 127k and personal costs were 80k. The staff are freelancers and work as required are paid with rates ranging from 50/h to 200/h. This includes developers and UX designers for multiple platforms.

    Since Lemmy is quite new and the project is growing rapidly it is experience growing pains. These issues require the sys admins in each instance to do work to resolve the issue and maintain the instance. As the software matures I expect the work required to maintain the instance will decrease. I expect that instances will need to use volunteer labor while they are small but will be able to pay staff once they grow large enough. I do not expect moderators will ever be paid because that would be very expensive and a nightmare to manage. Small instances are cheap to run and run into less issues requiring admins to step in.

    Going by what I outlined about I believe that the fediverse is sustainable for large servers and small. I dont think we will ever reach a stage where the only servers are corporate servers sustained by ads and investment. I dont think OP provides enough evidence that donations are not enough to sustain the fediverse.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.
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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)

    Even google cuts its services 1 year into running basically nuking all the time users spent on that service and giving them no alternative

    Google is known for cutting free services when there is no direct revenue from the users and it was not profitable on its own. You are making my argument for me here.

    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.

    Every popular FOSS product has either received itself investment from some corporation which wanted to profit from it, or it was financed by some large group who wanted to commoditize their complements.

    If the current model did not work I don’t think we would have gotten this far.

    "This far" in relation to what? Are you hoping to have the Fediverse as a viable alternative to everyone or are you feeling satisfied because it fulfills the needs of small niche? Do you want Lemmy to be like Linux, or do you want it to be like *BSD?

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