On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
@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?
@rglullis @blenderdumbass I have donations from members that cover the costs.
Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That’s better than most, I suppose.
Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn’t you consider then switching to a different model?
@rglullis I think the donation model is working ok at this scale, but I don’t believe it will scale up to the hypothetical future we were discussing on the show where the fediverse became the social media platform for the masses. There are somewhere around 1 to 2 million active fediverse users, depending on how you count. If that were 100x or 1000x larger, we would simply crumble - I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage that we end up paying for across various instance) and generally, people who use social media are far less concerned with the core value propositions of the fediverse, like privacy and whatnot. I know that’s hard to accept, but we’re here because that’s how we think. So no, I don’t think we will have a future where a 500,000,000 active user fediverse can be operated off of donations from members. I also very much doubt that people would pay a fee to be here when corporate social media alternatives are “free” to them
I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It “works” for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.
I think we need to change the general mindset that we “need” the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy “multiple seats” and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
You are misunderstanding the main idea behind the whole system. It is fork-able. So people can always change things they personally find they don’t like about it. You can not have anything where everybody has to do. Because those who don’t agree have all the technological and legal right to ignore you and do what they want instead. And this is the point with libre platforms ( or libre software in general ).
Whatever solution we find needs to take this fundamental thing into consideration.
Sorry, I don’t see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.
I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues… these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.
Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid “paying” someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.
We need to make it easy to check the financial health of an instance. And things like costs and money made from donations should be visible, and rendered as progress bars or charts. So people would know when and to whom to donate.
These things would be good but they wouldn’t change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly “funded” but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.
Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.