1
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.
I know you like hyperboles, but Bsky’s growth slowed quite a bit:
The main reason it’s much more successful than Mastodon is content discoverability
Agreed. And the problem Reddit and Lemmy solve is becoming a niche issue
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Meanwhile, the Mastodon devs are all sharing the belief that they are saints who are working “for the community”. Sorry, it’s not enough. We are not going to amount to much if our ambitions are that low.
It doesn’t matter the format. This is not (specifically) about Reddit, or Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok.
This is a discussion about a model that can keep sustainable development and operations of an open web. ActivityPub as whole allows us to think in much broader terms than “replacing Reddit” or "replacing Youtube. The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
You were saying “one million every week”. They hit 25 million users on 13 December. We are 4 weeks later, they still haven’t reached 27 millions. Not sure why using the actual numbers is considered silly.
Bsky having money gives them an advantage, nobody is denying that. But Mastodon had a huge opportunity the first time Musk messed up with Twitter. They were never able to create an easy enough to use solution for people to jump over, especially when microblogging relies on “high profile” posters. If Mastodon had managed to solve the discoverability issue, and convince people that it’s as easy to use as Twitter, the outcome could have been different. We’ll never know.
Okay, let’s go that route. As I said above, short video/“stories” format is king with people below 29 years old, be it Snapchat, Tiktok or BeReal https://www.statista.com/statistics/1337525/us-distribution-leading-social-media-platforms-by-age-group/
How do you plan to host video content at scale in a federated way? And if your answer is “make every teenager pay 5€ per month to get access to the network”, you’ll never get adoption.
At the end, that’s an unfair competition. We are competing with actors who can sell data and ads to make money. Most users don’t care. Those platforms make money, get more users thanks to the network effect.
I don’t really see how to solve this issue.
Because it depends on what you are using as your point of reference. In the end of November, they were just 15 million users. On average, they are getting one million users per week.
Hosting video is not the expensive part. It’s the distribution part that worries most people, but people forget that we have the technology to distribute large static files for decades already.
Please, stop using others as an excuse to your own behavior. You don’t want to pay 5€ a month. You have expressed many times you think a $29/year service is “expensive”, and you have said that you think that contributing to cover server costs is enough, which means that you don’t see the value of a professional hosting provider. If you are a grown, functioning adult, you are more than able to choose for yourself what you value. Your behavior is not determined by what “teenagers” will or will not do.
Why is that “every teenager” is fine with paying their phone bills, their Steam subscription, Spotify, Netflix, etc, etc… but not to pay for a service that is useful to them?
It doesn’t have to be between the two extremes of “free, but you get your data exploited” and “user pays everything”. Alternative business models will show up. Brave’s model of sharing the revenue from the (privacy-preserving) ads that users see (opt in) is one model. Bundling with services (“Sign up to Vodafone and get one a family package with 5 activitypub accounts!” “iCloud now supports ActivityPub”) is another. But for these alternative models to become interesting, first we need to make ActivityPub valuable as strong contender for an application protocol.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
If we go back 20 years ago, people would never believe that we would have a personal computing environment based on Free Software, and most would believe that Microsoft and Intel would dominate forever. Today we have Linux-based systems reaching almost 5% of the global market, and in some places going as high as 13%. But we didn’t get there overnight, and surely we did not get there on “community” alone.
Then why isn’t PeerTube more popular, especially with the amount of ads YouTube shows nowadays?
Why are you attacking me personally? Is it supposed to convince me to pay 29$/year for your service? If yes, sorry to say, but that’s not very effective, and I will keep donating to other instances like lemmy.zip, feddit.org or sopuli.xyz
If tomorrow a phone operator would provide the same service for free everyone would go there and leave the existing providers alone.
Steam has no subscription, what do you mean?
Spotify and Netflix are usually used in a family bundle because their parents find it convenient. But with the rising prices of streaming services, I see more and more people cancelling them and pirating content.
Did we get there because every Linux user paid a subscription to use the operating system?
Because those ads also provide revenue for the content creators. Content creators also need to be paid for their work.
It’s not an attack, but it is curious that you feel it is. I am using you as an example because you are one of the most active users here, you are frequently found promoting the Fediverse as an alternative, yet you don’t find it important to support the people that are working to keep the whole thing running.
I am using you as an example to show this common behavior here of people complaining about the state of the social media and exploitative companies, while at the same time exploiting the goodwill of the dozen people who are volunteering their time and money to put up this alternatives.
It’s pure hypocrisy. I don’t care whether you specifically sign up to Communick or not, but I do care about the fact that people do not understand basic economics and go around expecting that the Fediverse can succeed without paying the people that work to make it happen.
Only those who are completely financially illiterate would fall for such a ridiculous proposition.
Seriously, I don’t know anymore if you are arguing in the good faith.
The point is that we got there by having professionals being paid to work on it.
Content creators get paid via Patreon. There are several channels who use that way to sustain themselves. Patreon is a donation-based model, not a subscription.
It is, especially with the bold emphasis on “You”. You saying it’s not doesn’t deny that fact.
According to you. The day other admins will tell us that they can’t make the projects live anymore without additional donations, we can discuss this again. In the meantime, there is no indication that your statement is correct.
There is no free lunch, but in Facebook/Reddit/Twitter case they sell ads and user data to make money. And the vast majority of the population seems okay with that.
Professionals who got paid because they were delivering a product or a service to companies.
Which company is going to pay to get more features or a professional version of Lemmy or Piefed?
Lemmy is for personal use, not corporate, and that’s the main difference with Linux or Firefox. It is closer to something like https://gnucash.org/ than to a Linux distribution.
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Contributing_to_GnuCash
To get to the point where creators can get meaningful in income from Patreon, they already spent years producing content on YouTube or some other mainstream channel.
And even then, they still stay on YouTube because they get more money from YT (or their sponsorship deals, which is contingent on the size of their audience and thus dependent on YT) than from their supporters.
Funny you mention gnucash, because it is going around for 20+ years, yet it still has not made a dent on Intuit business. Even after all this time, anyone in the US who needs to file taxes still pays through the nose for QuickBooks.
So, yes, the fact that it exists does not mean that it is successful. And its failure is both due to a lack of ambition ( no one there pushing for ways to grow the organization) and for this cultural issue where the commons are not willing to financially support R&D if they don’t have to.
Indeed, so how would you plan to move enough people to PeerTube for this to change? As long as Youtube is a viable product, there is no real space for any other video website.
Linux has been around for 30+ years, is it making a dent on Microsoft and Apple’s business for personal computers?
Could you show me an example in the tech/dev/opensource space where end users countered the “tragedy of the commons”? Because after discussing all this time with you, it seems more due to human nature than anything else.