The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.

If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.

stux⚡

2025-04-19 12:07:35

Ooof 😟 this morning i got the server bills and currently im still a massive €470+ short..

Upcoming week I'm gonna dedicate go clean up servers, merge some to cut costs

Unofrt active users has gone down but the cost do keep return and even increase every month

Please, if you can and want, help me out with these bills

paypal.me/stuxOS
patreon.com/mstdn
ko-fi.com/mstdn
bunq.me/stuxhost
stux.me/donate
liberapay.com/mstdn

Boosts would also be a help❤️

stux.me:~$ Support By Donation

Most if not all the work I do (online) I give away for free! Personally I dislike advertisements so I won't apply those either.

^{stux (stux.me:~$)}

then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve

This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don't find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?

I'll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:

You're 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:

Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort 'for free' is a huge ask.

The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network... for free... is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.

You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it's a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing

This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money

And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.

The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.

Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small

Let’s get rid of open registration instances

How?

Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have

But isn't the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?

You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can't "get rid of open registration instances." That's just stupid.

• 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.

If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.

Most people don't want to self host. And most people aren't willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?

Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It's a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn't sustainable. I say it's a cycle. The specific instances don't matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there's at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.

If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users

That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don't have to be completely open registration.

Most people don't want to self host.

You don't need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.

Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.

Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.

Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.

Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you're fine with spending 1.25x more time.

Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.

Why not, though.

I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I'm not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.

That's why I'm saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.

My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.

I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That's where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their "free" idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.

It's not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick's instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.

Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.