We have to solve the money problem!
We have to solve the money problem!
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 poc…blenderdumbass . org
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Null User Object
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •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.
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Blender Dumbass
in reply to Null User Object • • •like this
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Null User Object
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •That's a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by..... asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven't done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn't a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
rglullis
in reply to Null User Object • • •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
ikt
in reply to Null User Object • • •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
rglullis
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •Let's get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
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.
Community is not enough
Raphael LullisNull User Object
in reply to rglullis • • •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.
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rglullis
in reply to Null User Object • • •I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I'd hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don't see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
Null User Object
in reply to rglullis • • •That I can agree with. But I think it's just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they're obviously unsustainable, so they won't be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they'll find that free instances just aren't an available.
rglullis
in reply to Null User Object • • •How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say "Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own"? I'm not going to say zero, but I really doubt it's going to be "more than 3".
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new ~~sucker~~ enthusiast coming up thinking "my server will be different".
Blaze (he/him)
in reply to rglullis • • •Not the nicest way to talk about @ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone, @Shadow@lemmy.ca or @Demigodrick@lemmy.zip
rglullis
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •I didn't insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.
You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.
Demigodrick
in reply to rglullis • • •Lemm.ee didn't shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn't one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
rglullis
in reply to Demigodrick • • •It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you'll be getting.
rumimevlevi
in reply to rglullis • • •like this
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in reply to rumimevlevi • • •like this
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rumimevlevi
in reply to rglullis • • •like this
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rglullis
in reply to rumimevlevi • • •Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.
rumimevlevi
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to rumimevlevi • • •rumimevlevi
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to rumimevlevi • • •rumimevlevi
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to rumimevlevi • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to rglullis • • •Lemmy fully managed open source service | Elest.io
elest.iorglullis
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •gedaliyah
in reply to rglullis • • •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.
rglullis
in reply to gedaliyah • • •Endymion_Mallorn
in reply to rglullis • • •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.
rglullis
in reply to Endymion_Mallorn • • •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.
You don't need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
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.
tofu
in reply to Null User Object • • •The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can't afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that's not much of a problem. I'm glad I can host for some people who don't have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don't and that's fine as well.
jerry
in reply to Null User Object • • •rglullis
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •@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?
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hisao
in reply to rglullis • • •SSD/NVMe Servers: Ultra-Fast Performance for Demanding Workloads - Optimize Performans Düşük Bütçe
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rglullis
in reply to hisao • • •Storage. In the video he says that backups alone costs $500/month.
Also, given that the instance is called "infosec.exchange", you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
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hisao
in reply to rglullis • • •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.
Why not, though.
rglullis
in reply to hisao • • •because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side...
I'm not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why "cheap" is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
hisao
in reply to rglullis • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to rglullis • • •Tropical Storm Jerry🌀
in reply to rglullis • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to Tropical Storm Jerry🌀 • • •Thank you for chiming in, Jerry!
Great interview, I only watched a part of it, but it was very interesting and refreshing to see your perspective on things. Thank you!
rglullis
in reply to Tropical Storm Jerry🌀 • • •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?
Steve
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •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.
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Sir Arthur V Quackington
in reply to Steve • • •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.
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catloaf
in reply to Sir Arthur V Quackington • • •like this
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rglullis
in reply to Sir Arthur V Quackington • • •like this
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Sir Arthur V Quackington
in reply to rglullis • • •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.
rglullis
in reply to Sir Arthur V Quackington • • •A Plan for Social Media - Rethinking Federation
Raphael LullisSteve
in reply to Sir Arthur V Quackington • • •like this
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Sir Arthur V Quackington
in reply to Steve • • •I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn't work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a "well gee we should just do this..." type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn't really exist today.
Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.
See, I'm fully aware this doesn't really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.
Endymion_Mallorn
in reply to Steve • • •Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can't approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren't expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they'll drop off social media altogether.
We've already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a 'donation' if you prefer, but if you're gating an action behind money, that's a fee), or simply don't allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it's free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.
rglullis
in reply to Endymion_Mallorn • • •Endymion_Mallorn
in reply to rglullis • • •rglullis
in reply to Endymion_Mallorn • • •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.
Steve
in reply to Endymion_Mallorn • • •Blaze (he/him)
in reply to Steve • • •I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa…
Fizz
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •like this
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rglullis
in reply to Fizz • • •Communick Collective: a zero-commission crowdfunding platform to support content creators in the Fediverse · Communick
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celeste
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •like this
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hisao
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •like this
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rglullis
in reply to hisao • • •hisao
in reply to rglullis • • •nocturne
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •I joined my instance's patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.
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ikt
in reply to nocturne • • •He missed a bit:
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ragingHungryPanda
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •Wtf!?
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Blaze (he/him)
in reply to ragingHungryPanda • • •I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa…
For the host question, it's at 34:11
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jerry
in reply to Blaze (he/him) • • •like this
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Blaze (he/him)
in reply to jerry • • •No questions from my side, just a big thank you to mention Mbin, Lemmy, the Fediverse in that interview. It's probably the first time for me where I watch a video talking about all of this, which is curious with how part of my daily life it is.
I still haven't watched everything, but one of your quotes sounded resonated with me "We're only here for a short time. Why should we be a-holes to each other, and not just try to enjoy ourselves?"
Anyway, thank you for everything, take care!
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aasatru
in reply to ragingHungryPanda • • •Seems to be some misunderstanding somewhere - Jerry states elsewhere that the costs are covered by donations.
The Mastodon instance I'm on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
Tropical Storm Jerry🌀
2025-06-12 14:49:50
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lagoon8622
in reply to aasatru • • •jerry
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •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.
surewhynotlem
in reply to jerry • • •dangling_cat
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.
Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.
Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.
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nasi_goreng
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.
Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server.
They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day.
Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook.
They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event.
They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.
Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.
SorteKanin
in reply to Blender Dumbass • • •