I'm curious, how much does it cost you, monthly, on average, to participate in the fediverse?

Osma A

@thenexusofprivacy
Back in the day, when running social apps took real design effort, a sizeable developer team, and lots of dedicated hardware in addition to moderation, Habbo could edge along profitability at about €1 per active user per month (it was about €9/mo per 11% paying users) at less than an order of magnitude more users.. Those numbers are now 15y old.
@stefan

The Nexus of Privacy

Whoops when I run the numbers it's more than my original estimate!

@stefan whoops case you want to check it:

~ 250K * $2 each = $500K ($1-5 category)
~ 200K * $5 = $1M
~ 100K * 10 = $1M
~ 20K * $50 = $1M
~ 20K * $100 = $2M

so that's $5.5M !

@stefan

Stefan Bohacek

@thenexusofprivacy Nice!

The Nexus of Privacy

A great data point. My guess is that fedi's server costs are much higher than commercial competitors -- both because decentralization means a lot of duplicated hardware and disk storage, and also because Mastodon's a resource hog. On the other hand almost all moderation and admin is done by volunteers ... and a chunk of the development work is also ither funded by NLnet or done by volunteers.

@osma @stefan

Osma A

@thenexusofprivacy
Mastodon is a resource hog and there is a lot of duplication, and we did A LOT of work to make Habbo run efficiently, but still, 15 years of hardware development and better at-scale software frameworks count. What was big data then is a Mac Mini today.
@stefan

The Nexus of Privacy

yeah, totally agree -- I didn't mean server costs are higher than $1/user/month, just that they're higher than commercial competitors today.

@osma @stefan

Alejandro Gaita Ariño 🐌 :ecoanarchism_heart:

@stefan
I forget to pay each year, but each year I get the Liberapay reminder by email and I pay my yearly dues (and by chance this happened a few minutes ago)

Stefan Bohacek

@agaitaarino Nice!

wakest ⁂

@thenexusofprivacy @stefan interesting to see this attempted estimate! (fyi $5.5M, you wrote K)

The Nexus of Privacy

whopps again, good catch! looks like my brain was already on holiday ...

@liaizon @stefan

:mastodonworld: Caleb

@stefan I’m disappointed I missed these polls. I’ve long been curious how the community feels on distribution of donations.

I currently donate to my server administration and have a subscription to my app but have not yet made any donations to platform development 🫣

Stefan Bohacek

@ccunning It sounds like you're doing great, it's really hard to support every single project/app/developer!