The admin of the third largest Mastodon instance (16k monthly active users) is asking for help to pay rent
stux⚡ (@stux@mstdn.social)
Please, tell me how "paying for hardware costs is enough"...
So? Do, or don't. Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running, or it doesn't and goes under.
Altruism doesn't pay the bills; but it doesn't hurt to ask. Can't blame them for that.
Yeah, so he's asking.
Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running
You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.
I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.
What do you mean "so?" Maybe it does provide enough value. Not enough people know that they have to pay real money to keep the servers running. Thus the request...
I meant it as "So what if they ask for help? Do, or don't (donate)"
The initial post came off to me as a dig at the admin for openly asking for money.
The early internet was so good because it mainly consisted from academics or people willing to share knowledge and exchange it. Modern internet is dying because of the fact that most of users are leeches and don't contribute to the equation. Most tech youtube channels are dying because there is no gratification for content creators, it takes a lot of time, money to produce the content and they get no benefit. The end effect is they shut the whole thing down, thank you for the "service", you only contribute to the internet "quality" downfall
I think you're misreading my reply (or i worded it poorly). I agree with you 100% and do contribute to the instances I use and the content creators I watch.
I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.
I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people's servers.
Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?
I'm running my instance for the same reason, it's been running for over a year and I'm the only active user. Although there's people passively using it as well.
Storage doesn't go over 100GB much. The only downside I notice is a community on Lemmy is only federated if at least one of the users is subscribed to it. Using Lemmy-federate you can add a bot account that subscribes to new communities.
You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn't en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I'm just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage. I already pay for that regardless as I use it for other things. Though ideally I would not want to allocate more than 500Gb for a one person instance, idk how reasonable would that be.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you'll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
And now that I'm wondering things I wonder how feasible would it be to host very small instances on cheap devices like sbc or cheap mini-pc. Maybe aiming for thousands of instances with a few dozen people in each instead of a few dozen of instances with thousand of people in them.
I haven't tried an OG Mastodon server, but currently running a GotoSocial instance, just for me.
With mostly the default retention etc. settings, the instance takes at most a couple gigs of storage space. If some image has been rotated, it will be refetched if you view the post again.
As for Federation, a single user instance is probably not a good idea if you're just starting with the Fediverse. Only content from accounts a user on your server follows will reach your server, including posts boosted by the people someone follows. I was already following about 150 accounts when I set it up, so I didn't really notice much difference in the home feed.
OG Mastodon can utilize relays, which will help with the lack of content.
For following topics, I made another user that follows some hashtag bots from fedi.buzz. The bots boost all posts with specific hashtags, so the posts reach my server.
If I were to do this again, I'd probably go with full Mastodon instead of GtS, just because I like the UI. There are other niceties too.
I think there's no way to keep the same domain while changing the underlying server software, without breaking federation. If someone knows a way I'd be really interested.
I've run a couple single-user Pleroma and Akkoma instances for 1 to 3 years each, one of them with a lot of follows in both directions and plenty of multimedia, and it worked fine on hardware 6 generations old on a crappy Comcast plan proxied thru a $4/mo VPS.
Other platform software (Mastodon especially) consumes vastly more compute resources than the Pleroma family. I haven't tried self-hosting Lemmy yet. YMMV.
We need more peer to peer hosting
That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.
It's already there - it's called hyphanet ( old freenet ). It works really well removing the need being always online but it's not popular because of no mobile clients
The core argument here is should there be an expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs.
Personally, if an instance is run off of donations, then it's a nice to have. As an admin, you shouldn't have that expectation. If you no longer want to volunteer your time, then don't. Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
I'm also okay with paid instances and admins trying to make a reasonable salary or even making additional profit as long as it's transparent to the users. It's their choice to charge, it's our choice to pay.
Overall, instances should be run by a group of volunteers, not a single individual. Otherwise, the long term viability of the instance is questionable.
My local Madison insurance is forming a steering committee and has created an LLC. (I'm a member of the committee.) We will solicit donations, because mostly it has been one guy paying for a small regional instance of about 100 AU.
We think of it like public broadcasting, like PBS. I will be happy to kick in a few dollars per month to pay for it. We have contests, online meetups, and other fun. It's not just Mastodon, it's an active regional online community, and it's worth it.
(I also donate to my Lemmy instance, because it's worth it too!)
expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs
Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn't be treated as a disposable entity who don't need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.
It's a "I want you to want to do the dishes" kind of thing.
Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying "you know what? You don't want to help me, so I don't owe your lot anything".
Well it's not easy. They are unsung heroes. They aren't the only volunteers in this world. Do you think the people in our communities volunteering to pick up trash or people at homeless shelters volunteering are requesting compensation or a pat on the back? Honestly, there's more than enough instances and volunteers to host those instances.
And just to clarify, I do think our admins deserve a pat on the back and donations. I am eternally grateful, but they shouldn't resent their community for not donating to them.
have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month
Are those Lemmy instances, or other software like Mastodon?
This is one of the things that make me think the current "fediverse" isn't going to be its final form. It's a good stepping stone, but users and communities being locked to a single instance will become a bugbear sooner rather than later.
@rglullis@communick.news my honest recommendation is to switch to the plain text only mode and disable file / media upload if it's possible. Hosting plain text data is cheap. Let them share links only to their cdns, servers or ipfs for media
Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.
I can send you the full 274 on the 1st but I cannot use PayPal. If we can figure out a different way for me to get you the money hmu
Shit happens, unexpected costs come up.
It's not like there's massive global financial instability going on...
How about minding your own business?
Doesn't the Netherlands help you pay for your home if you're too poor to be able to yourself?
I'm not saying don't give anything, just wondering.
I would assume ",being late on rent from mastodon server costs" is not an acceptable reason
Things doesn't usually work like that.
Rent subsidiaries work by your annual income and usually the cost of your rent.
For instance they may pay you 300€ a month for your rent as long as your income is less than 30.000€ a year and your rent is bellow 800€/month. And increasing the thresholds if you have kids or if you are part of a protected collective.
They may be above these thresholds. It's pretty common in Europe for people who struggle to meet ends are above the needed thresholds for getting help. As prices have gone really up and the bar for being lower class have change a lot lately as there is a lot of new extremely poor people to help. So money don't end up being enough for all. And people with normal jobs and who live alone or with their SO usually do not get any help even if they need it.
The welfare state is kind of falling apart in the latest years.
Makes sense :)
stux blocked at least one of my fediverse identities and I recognize I'm not objective but if he can't keep the instance online then like ok.
Rent comes before server. An outage is a wonderful motivator, turn that shit off.
I assume he's applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.
The distinction is an illusion. If a person can't afford to live, and a part of their life is running a server, who gives a fuck which dollar goes where?
(Other than all the dipshits who offer 0 and demand anything more than nothing.)
Or we could drop the whole idea of depending on "donations" and understand that admins are professionals who would like to make a living like everyone else?