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Esk 🐌⚡💜 (@[email protected])
hachyderm.io@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma so stats, based on dec 2024 exit run rate (rounded for simplicity):
#hachyderm costs about $1600/mo to run. this is up somewhat, as we've started to add some infra as part of our resilience plan announced in nov.
we currently have about:
- 55000 users
- 9700 MAU
- 3.7M toots
yielding:
- $.03/user/mo
- $.16/active user/mo
- $.0004/toot
from a raw compute & storage perspective.
again, this is based on 100% volunteer work. today, our mods and infra folk graciously donate their time to keep this thing going.
hypothetically, if we paid them, say, $120k USD/yr (chose this to make the math cleaner), that would add $10k/person/mo to the cost.
if we go with a staff of eight (mix of mod & infra), that adds $80k/mo to the run rate, for a total of $81,600/mo, yielding:
- $1.48/user/mo
- $8.41/active user/mo
- the toot figure is silly, so i'm not calculating it again :blobfoxlaugh:
orders of magnitude of difference.
we could argue about the staff size - i went with roughly what we have today and assumed we made everyone full time so they could hachy for 32/hr/wk vs. calculating the number of hours we actually work. e.g. maybe we could it out at ~$4.50/user/mo, but still a multiple orders of magnitude bump from the raw infra cost.
In practice, you’d need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.
So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.
18 months after the API debacle on Reddit, most of the instances are still around. If the model was not sustainable, wouldn’t have all closed?
Your question is as short-sighted as “If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?”
No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.
This logic would mean all nonprofits would fail. It’s flawed.
What do you mean? Even non-profits have income and pay salaries to the people working there.
Many 501c3 orgs only bring income in through donations.
So what? The donations are also supposed to pay for the salaries of the people working there!
The argument is not “no for-profit system is sustainable”, but “no instance is receiving to sustain those working”
Holy crap, arguing here sometimes feel like fighting an army of strawmen… Please stop putting your own ideology and how you think things should be and let’s talk about what how things really are operating.
Kettle?
When you show me one instance that is able to handle a large number of users (more than 10k) and that is financed by voluntary donations, and that the people working on it are paid appropriately to their role and time spent on it, I will gladly concede that the model works.
Until then, we have about 15 years of history since Diaspora, and every attempt at keeping a “free as in beer” community has failed, and in lots of cases spectacularly so. From admins who got doxxed by their own “community”, to people outright giving up on the whole idea (like the feddit.de) to cases where they felt so pressured to keep supporting the people that led them to commit suicide.
If admins need more money, they can ask for help to their communities.
Lemmy.zip seems to be doing okay: https://lemmy.zip/post/29448608?scrollToComments=true
Lemm.ee had a question about a donation link and never answered https://lemm.ee/post/49850162?scrollToComments=true
I know a few instance admins who runs their instances on hardware they would be using anyway.
Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven’t seen such request ever.
Do you realize the issue with this reasoning? Here’s a hint.
You don’t see admins “asking for money” to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it’s not trying to take over Amazon, but that’s probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn’t realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that’s where the userbase and money is now.
Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.
Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not "oh, I really want to get my book in the local library. They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.
To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their “main business” and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.
The focus was on volunteering projects lasting a long time.
Which is the wrong focus.
I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don’t want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of “cheap, universally available” food.