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

Stefan Bohacek

@bayport Good idea!

kat

@stefan I think I'm in the $5 bracket.

I have use a subdomain of a domain I already use for things.

I run the actual application on a laptop I use to watch media on at home.. so it would be on anyway.

I just keep a tiny EC2 VM to proxy requests back to the home laptop and have a static public IP.

I reckon this quite minimal

Stefan Bohacek

@kat Interesting setup!

Seeing a few people run their server from home, pretty cool!

The Nexus of Privacy

@stefan interesting results, thanks for doing this! With roughly 1,000,000 active users in fedi today, if these numbers are representative (a big if of ourse but still interesting), then it projects to a total of $5,000,000 or more per month -- not counting labor or corporate funding.

EDIT: corrected original estimate, which was too low -- see the reply!

Stefan Bohacek

@thenexusofprivacy Who needs VC money!

Thank you for doing the math!

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!