Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.
I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.
Time to start putting ads in.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.
I’d rather have a… gags… Subscription.
Yup. As jerry illustrated, this shit isn’t free.
I support ads.
Oh, calm down. I don’t support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.
And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.
The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren’t that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it’s their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don’t think it’s appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?start=38m45s
Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.
Jerry was in this thread, feel free to convince him rather than me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46526295/19376934
Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
Something similar is available for PeerTube:
- Platform redundancy by P2P, and
- offload of transcoding and transcription to Remote Runners
@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.
And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else’s?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they’re using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
- Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
- Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
- Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
- Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
- Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
- Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say… Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
