Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).
However, there are a few things I’m curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!
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What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
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Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?
Admin of a tiny instance with some somewhat active communities here. Monetary cost is almost zero because my lemmy instance runs on my own hardware. It uses around 250mb of ram and 50gb of storage which is pretty much nothing. Im currently not looking for any sort of donation
Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost? And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations? What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?
Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost?
I currently dont have open registration without me confirming every entry application so uncontrolled growth isn’t really possible. Ill probably close registration as soon as there are too many people for me to host the instance in my basement. I would probably set up a donation page if I paid more than like 30 bucks a month for hosting.
And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations?
Donations seem to work fine on big instances like lemmy.world . Not sure about smaller ones tho
What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?
I hate ads and everything that tries to shove them down my throat. Most people on lemmy are somewhat tech savy and are probably already using an adblock. So ill make the experience a lot worse for a small amount of people without adblock and wouldnt be getting much money.
What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
Right now everything is funded through donations though it’s not clear how feasible that is in the long term. I wouldn’t be surprised if some instances run ads in the future.
Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse?
Maturation. It’s just that most Fediverse sites outside of Mastodon aren’t ready for prime time. Lemmy just recently started getting great apps and stabilization updates. Other projects like Kbin aren’t there yet. I think it’ll take time before the Fediverse has an easy onboarding process.
If we do have some instances running ads, wouldn’t that run counter to the goals of the Fediverse? It’s my understanding that much of the migration from Big Tech platforms to Fediverse platforms is to escape the intrusive nature of ads and to prevent the Big Tech companies from taking user data and giving it to advertisers, something that is a major privacy concern these days.
If we do have some instances running ads, wouldn’t that run counter to the goals of the Fediverse?
Not really. You can always switch to another instance, and there’s a big difference between running few ads to stay afloat and being a for-profit company like other social media. The Fediverse would still be by the community, for the community even if some instances run ads.
im running a bare bones instance, just starting to get some users. i am using one of the higher cost providers in AWS, and my total costs are ~$1.02/day. i could probably get to about 25 users before i have to double these costs in the form of the next tier of hosting, but then i could probably scale to 250-500 users. for ~2$/day. i can imagine donations allowing me to scale to many thousands of users before the leecher/donation ratio tips.
its not that expensive, but then, i dont have a ton of leechers either.
attracting users? no idea. i hate social media. im here for the sysadminin’
what specs are you getting for 1 buck a day?
for the vm, its the ec2 T3a plus associated services (4Gb ram, burst processing)
seems pretty overpriced imo
yes its at least double the cost of less mature providers
are they doing anything special that justifies that price?
its amazon, they have an extremely mature ecosystem. so everything is stupid easy to setup and run (interoperate).
and dashboards are sooo pretty
I find it’s going to need to get even more coonvenient for the general public to be interested in it. Federation almost needs to be a ‘background’ process that the end user doesn’t really need to deal with. Otherwise, it’ll be a little too complicated or obscure to comprehend for most. I know it isn’t rocet science but we’re talking about the general public, here.
the biggest hurdle ive seen is the lack of federated sso/id. users expect the remote sites to know who they are, and then lose the process where they need to open that thread in their local instance.
I’m a new user, so hope you don’t mind answering a question - tried looking this up but no joy: I understand the broad concept of federated sso/id, but what do you mean by opening threads in the local instance?
Here’s an example. Say you want to visit the Engineering community on sh.itjust.works. The community lives at this URL:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/engineeringHowever, you are using an account at lemm.ee. In order to post or comment you need to access the community via lemm.ee, which means using this URL:
https://lemm.ee/c/engineering@sh.itjust.worksGoing to the first URL is accessing the community directly.
Going to the second URL is accessing the community through your local instance. lemm.ee fetches the contents of the community and saves a local copy for you (and for all the other lemm.ee users). Any posts or comments you make get synced back to the community.Edit: If you are using Lemmy through a smartphone app then don’t worry about this distinction. The app is taking care of this for you and always accessing everything through your local instance.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !engineering@sh.itjust.works
Cost of hosting an instance is highly variable based on the way it’s hosted, the size of the instance, and what sort of instance it is (since there’s many different kinds such as mastodon, peertube, Lemmy, etc)
Self hosting from home can cost just the price of hardware and power. Once you outsource hosting as many large instances do the price starts to rise. It’s the large instances that start asking for donations as well, since it does cost more and more.
The fediverse vs. Big tech is the tortoise and the hare. It keeps slowly growing and as big tech takes a nap under a tree and pisses more people off by making more bad decisions. There’s nothing fundamentally impossible about the concept – email is federated and most boomers are just fine with email.
That’s an interesting analogy!
It would appear that the overall nature of the Fediverse is to have numerous small instances that can communicate with each other, and since instance size is a factor in determining the cost of hosting, many people could host without seeing a huge chunk of their income being taken away for hosting.
Of course, I would imagine other factors that would determine whether someone should host or not, like having the technical competence necessary to troubleshoot server issues.
lemmy.world reports monthly expenses around €1,200 per month, but they’re also running multiple other services for that expense. Those costs are all covered by donations.
Smaller Lemmy instances are much less expensive. I’ve seen admins comment that they pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month.
