I assume he's applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.

I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.

Yeah, so he's asking.

Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running

You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.

I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.

What do you mean "so?" Maybe it does provide enough value. Not enough people know that they have to pay real money to keep the servers running. Thus the request...

The early internet was so good because it mainly consisted from academics or people willing to share knowledge and exchange it. Modern internet is dying because of the fact that most of users are leeches and don't contribute to the equation. Most tech youtube channels are dying because there is no gratification for content creators, it takes a lot of time, money to produce the content and they get no benefit. The end effect is they shut the whole thing down, thank you for the "service", you only contribute to the internet "quality" downfall

I'm running my instance for the same reason, it's been running for over a year and I'm the only active user. Although there's people passively using it as well.

Storage doesn't go over 100GB much. The only downside I notice is a community on Lemmy is only federated if at least one of the users is subscribed to it. Using Lemmy-federate you can add a bot account that subscribes to new communities.

You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.

But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.

I haven't tried an OG Mastodon server, but currently running a GotoSocial instance, just for me.

With mostly the default retention etc. settings, the instance takes at most a couple gigs of storage space. If some image has been rotated, it will be refetched if you view the post again.

As for Federation, a single user instance is probably not a good idea if you're just starting with the Fediverse. Only content from accounts a user on your server follows will reach your server, including posts boosted by the people someone follows. I was already following about 150 accounts when I set it up, so I didn't really notice much difference in the home feed.

OG Mastodon can utilize relays, which will help with the lack of content.

For following topics, I made another user that follows some hashtag bots from fedi.buzz. The bots boost all posts with specific hashtags, so the posts reach my server.

If I were to do this again, I'd probably go with full Mastodon instead of GtS, just because I like the UI. There are other niceties too.

I think there's no way to keep the same domain while changing the underlying server software, without breaking federation. If someone knows a way I'd be really interested.

That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.

It's already there - it's called hyphanet ( old freenet ). It works really well removing the need being always online but it's not popular because of no mobile clients

My local Madison insurance is forming a steering committee and has created an LLC. (I'm a member of the committee.) We will solicit donations, because mostly it has been one guy paying for a small regional instance of about 100 AU.

We think of it like public broadcasting, like PBS. I will be happy to kick in a few dollars per month to pay for it. We have contests, online meetups, and other fun. It's not just Mastodon, it's an active regional online community, and it's worth it.

(I also donate to my Lemmy instance, because it's worth it too!)

expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs

Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn't be treated as a disposable entity who don't need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.

It's a "I want you to want to do the dishes" kind of thing.

Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.

Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying "you know what? You don't want to help me, so I don't owe your lot anything".

This is one of the things that make me think the current "fediverse" isn't going to be its final form. It's a good stepping stone, but users and communities being locked to a single instance will become a bugbear sooner rather than later.

Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.

I would assume ",being late on rent from mastodon server costs" is not an acceptable reason