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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.
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.