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Fediverse sustainability
(lemmy.ml)
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this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2023
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Fediverse
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A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
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The "financial aspect" is much smaller than you seem to think.
It is not that expensive to run a server, and there are lots of people willing to contribute. You can look at the previously posted expenses and donations information from the lemmy.world admins.
You might be telling yourself these things are difficult and expensive because you don't know, and precaution leads you to overestimate the actual costs and difficulty. That is fine when you're making choices for yourself, but it reliably produces incorrect results if you try to apply it to the world at large. In reality, there are lots of people out here who know how to run Internet services; and some of them have set this one up pretty well.
(note: I am a social democratic capitalist, don't take this as an anti-capitalist rant)
Ever wonder why capitalistic IT is so expensive?
It's not because of the cost of developers, hardware or internet, even though those things are not cheap.
It's mainly because companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft make insanely huge profits and those profits must come from revenue. And to ensure they don't lose market share, they overspend an insane amount on hiring armies of the best developers, most of whom aren't doing much productive work, but are paid hefty salaries.
And they also have complex internal politics, manager layers, architects, and a whole lot of highly paid people working alongside the developers and slowing them down.
So the parent is totally right. Hosting something like Lemmy and developing it isn't that expensive, especially because it runs on a lot of volunteer time and doesn't have a lot of fluff around it.
And also, they aren't spending armies of developers and UX engineers to analyze and maximize the number of hours you spend on Lemmy. Or to maximize ad revenue. Or to implement DRM. Or to think of a premium offer and then develop a two tiered experience.
Once you get rid of all the capitalistic fluff, most of the basics we need are surprisingly cheap and easy to develop and run.
I do believe people should make it a regular practice to pay for the software they like and use. So donate here and there.
But if you are ever in doubt, just look at the sheer number of Linux distros built and maintained by volunteers.
I'd suggest the "complex internal politics, manager layers, architects" -- and the fancy offices, cafeterias, and other amenities -- are actually quite a lot more expensive than the developers.
But don't underestimate ads, and things that are similar to ads. In competitive markets, ads are really expensive, because ads are rivalrous. Venture A has to outbid Venture B for ad placement. The same sort of logic goes for hiring, especially hiring of trend-driven fields like project management. ("I'm a Scrum Master, who are you, a scum master?")
I agree.
In terms of things that make capitalistic IT expensive, #1 would be the profit extracted by shareholders (either directly or through licensing schemes) , #2 would be the layer of highly paid "very important people" and then #3 would be developer cost.
One note: It's pretty rare for tech companies to directly issue profits to shareholders (i.e. as dividends). Rather, profits are usually reinvested into expanding the company; and shareholders make money by selling shares that have risen in value.
Eh... Tech companies do some of the biggest stock buybacks, which is a transfer of profits to shareholders.
But yes, they also reinvest money.
I don’t know yet there have been several instances that shut down do to finances. Tell me how does something shut down due to finances if it’s not costly for the person? The Fediverse is also much larger than Lemmy.
Look at the actual numbers.
In August, total expenses = €1205, total donations = €2649
People want this thing to work and are willing to donate to make it happen. And again, it's not as expensive to run as you seem to think.
This is ONE instance. Search or make a post and ask how many instances have shut down due to finances. Outside of finances it’s burnout due to moderation.
Could you explain in detail how you, personally, are helping?
Or, more generally, on what basis do you think you know better?
I think "shut down due to finances" really means "it was too much work to organize this, collect donations and run a production website" or "my site was too niche to attract users and i didn't want to put the effort in".
There's enough instances with public finances, to show that it's a solvable problem.
Does it matter? What if I start 24 instances tomorrow and shut them all down by friday? Does that really have an impact on sustainability? Conversely them pointing to lemmy.world is a prime example of exactly how it is sustainable. As long as one instance remains running it is sustaining. Other instances may come and go and that's sad and all. But it's pretty affordable by most metrics
It does matter if people are on your instance, just say you don’t care about others. Several instances have shutdown without warning and people lost their accounts. It matters because people matters. We should also want good experiences. Stating that people will get over it and find a new instance and make new posting history is selfish af
Untold email servers have shut down and people have lost their accounts there. But email seems pretty sustainable still. So that doesn't seem like a good metric either.
Do the expenses include the cost of labor from admins and moderators?
When there is a big issue hitting the fediverse (like an bunch of script kiddies attacking servers and pushing CSAM), are we going to just wait for the admins to clock out of the regular-jobs-that-pay-the-bills and then take a look at it?
Lemmy.world is the largest instance and is getting less than 25 cents per user in donations. Meanwhile, Facebook has shown that the true price of what a privacy-respecting social media site is around 10€/month. Do you really think that 25 cents per user is enough to keep this minimally professional?
Facebook doesn't have a lot of reason to go be telling exactly the truth there ...
The precise price doesn't matter, but the order of magnitude does.
Even if Zuck is lying and he is pushing a high price as extortion tactic. Cut that 10€ by 4 and let's say that the "real" price is 2.50€. That's still 10x more than lemmy.world is getting in donations.
Maybe Facebook has bigger problems because they're so huge; like being a bigger target for attack by hate groups.
Maybe they just really like their fancy offices and cafeterias.
Maybe it's just better for the world if online speech is diversified over lots of small services instead of one monopoly service; and this is reflected in the way the world actually behaves towards these different services.
Conversely, the fact that they are one single corporation lets them achieve economies of scale and reduce their operational costs per user.
Yeah, so what? Do you think that the developers of free software, the admins of the instances and the moderators putting in time to make this work don't deserve recognition/compensation for their work?
You are basically saying that only martyrs should be doing work on FOSS, the Fediverse and anything that is based on a good ethical foundation. It's basically giving the middle finger to the people who can actually make a difference.
Absolutely agree. The more decentralized, the more resilient we become. However, the cost per user does not go down, in fact it goes up. Running the infrastructure to serve 2 billion people (like Instagram/Facebook/WhatsApp) requires massive resources already in a centralized/highly optimized corporation, on a decentralized structure it will cost even more. The question is: are the people willing to bear these costs? So far, the data says "no, they are not".
Why not? It's a hobby project.
I thought we didn't want big companies to control the fediverse? But if we want people to main-job it, then naturally you're turning it into a business, and sooner or later the larger it gets, the largest will be, well, a big company. Naturally. A Lemmy-company, basically. Lemmy.world Ltd.
Do we want big business to run the place, or not? In the latter case, it cannot be a viable full time job, or it will naturally turn into the former if successful.
Why?! Why be self-limiting about it?
Do you think that when NLNet gave the Lemmy devs a grant, they were just funding a hobby or do you think they were hoping to make it a viable alternative?
It does not follow. As long as it is open source, it can not be controlled by any single entity. History is full of cases of companies that tried to exert control over open platforms and it did not end up well for them.
For context lemmy.ca runs on $125/cdn month and could be downsized still, we've overspecced for the load we get today. We could probably cut that in half.