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.
The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to host 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
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
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.
If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There’s no reason instances can’t use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I’ll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.
The reason they can’t show ads is actually pretty simple: if I’m going to have ads in my feed, I’m just going to go back to Reddit for the same experience. Plus, when you consider dbzer0 et al, you’re going to come to the conclusion that ads will either be a waste because everyone is using a strong adblock on Firefox or a browser that doesn’t care about Google manifest standards, or the people who see them will be incredibly pissed, leave the instance, and either return to Reddit (or an alternative) or move instances and make a lot of noise toward defed’ing from the ad-ridden instance.
For me, I would rather just run an adblock and an anti-adblock-blocker on a different service than go through the frustration of ads on a non-corp platform.
It sounds like you’re thinking there is no way to compete with Reddit. If you charge, people will use Reddit. If you have ads, people will use Reddit. People are only here because there aren’t ads and it’s free?
That’s basically correct, yes. I don’t see the fediverse platform(s) as being “special” compared to others. Sure, there’s political and social momentum that keeps people here, especially due to anticorporate causes. People are here because they got ticked about the Reddit API changes, the ads, and the monetization (Reddit Gold, etc).
If any of those things change, people will see that they’re not getting the value they were looking for, and will go back.
Do you know that the person you just responded to is one of the first subscribers of Communick?
No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn’t have to care anymore.
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.
Fair point about his actions, and I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us. I disagree strongly about everyone paying. We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community. We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit. Money shouldn’t need to change hands.
See, I get your point on PeerTube, but I counter with the fact that we did have video online before YouTube. That wasn’t the revolution. It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut. Same with streaming before ryan.tv. Before it was free, it was extremely niche. When monetary investment stopped being needed, it hit the mainstream. If the monetization of video content comes directly from viewers, you will go back to dedicated hobbyists and those who are certain that videos will be funded in advance.
What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.
No one can use your content to pay their bills.
The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.
Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?
There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.
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:
That’s not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn’t very scalable.
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.
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.
Instead of going for these complicated architectures, it would be better to simplify and make activitypub less dependent on server software.
Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.
I think that would just be a different instance.