This study is unscientific garbage and should be retracted.

Their “simulation” of making tea involved 300 teabags boiled in 600ml of water at 95 C while being stirred at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time. They then took counts using undiluted samples of that liquid.

It isn’t clear why they chose such an absurd methodology, but it is absolutely spurious to draw conclusions from this about teabags used under normal conditions.

This study is such bullshit. They took 300 teabags and boiled them in 600ml of water while stirring at 750rpm for an unspecified amount of time, and claim their method to be an accurate simulation of making a cup of tea.

I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.

More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.

Ultimately though, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.

The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.

I don’t know man. It feels like pigeonholing somebody’s sexual preferences based on the style of their clothing might not be accurate.

Take a look at this photo of Mötley Crue from back in the day, and those guys were renowned for their heterosexuality.

It’s in quotes because the headline is quoting a source rather than reporting information that the newspaper has evaluated themselves.

I see what you’re getting at and your position is reasonable, but I think misses the point of the initial comment, viz. The Economist is known for objective reporting (neutrality in bias), in part because they are open about their editorial slant (non-neutrality of opinion).

For example: “Ukraine is winning the economic war. This is a good thing.” - Economist reporting vs. “Ukraine is winning the economic war. This is a bad thing.” - Converse-Economist vs. “Ukraine is losing the economic war.” - Pro-Russian bias

It might not contribute to the conversation, but I thought your response was worth an upvote.

The accusations date to 2010 and he gave up his citizenship in 2012.

You didn’t read story. The alleged crimes happened while he was still a US citizen.

If true, that would still make it not quite as bad as Twitter.

Do you have citations to support any of your claims?

This is materially incorrect in multiple ways.

1. The Economist’s reporting is widely recognized for its absence of bias.
2. Leaders are not opinion pieces, they are brief overviews, hence why they seem like “truncated versions” of articles.
3. The “snippets of opinion” to which you refer are reporting on public opinion. I thought that was obvious.

This is false. It still has areas in which it could improve, but it is a thousand times better than twitter.