This is wild!

Stefan Bohacek

@atomicpoet Oh wow, very impressive!

Laurens Hof

I find the idea that people are donating 5.5M per month to fedi stuff incredibly hard to square with the observation that Mastodon only managed to raise 12k in their latest fundraiser for a trust&safety lead

Support Mastodon this Giving Tuesday!

Support Mastodon's Giving Tuesday campaign to fund a Trust & Safety Lead, ensuring a safe, inclusive, and thriving community. Donate today to make a difference!

Mastodon Inc (givebutter.com)

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@laurenshof @atomicpoet @stefan I think that’s pretty much conceptually true (if you include pro-bono work)

Servers, storage, bandwidth is expensive…. But admins/moderators are doing millions of free hours of work every year.

We need to fix the fediverse cost and get the developers and the ecosystem paid tho.

The fediverse can be an economy but it takes time

Chris Trottier

@[email protected] @[email protected] Donating? No, I don't think they're contributing $5.5M in donations.

I suspect most money paid is from people like myself who are directly paying to run servers.

Laurens Hof

@atomicpoet @stefan

I think you are vastly overindexing the amount of people who selfhost or run their own small servers via hosting companies. Your experience and cost for your server is an extreme outlier. Nothing wrong with that, you've got a cool setup, happy for you.

But I strongly doubt that the 5.5M/month cost number is even remotely close to being accurate

Chris Trottier

@laurenshof @stefan Outliers are always the ones who fund paid social media services.

The average user doesn’t pay. But someone with a specific need does.

Do the math for yourself, though. If nearly 30,000 Fediverse servers are running and the median price is $100, that alone is $3M.

Laurens Hof

@atomicpoet @stefan

Sure, we can do math that make it makes sense. But the point I'm making is that if you're making an assumptions-based calculation its good practice to validate the results if they make align with other real-world data that is not part of the calculation. That's why I brought up Mastodon only raising 12k in a fundraiser, as its a datapoint outside of the calculation that shows significant discrepancy

Stefan Bohacek

@laurenshof @atomicpoet I think this particular fundraiser is interesting to compare with the one for Kamala Harris.

Mastodon users donate a quarter million dollars in 2 days for VP Harris #MastodonForHarris

Over the last two days users from the social media service Mastodon have started a campaign which has raised over $250,000 for VP Harris. User Heidi Li Feldman started the modest campaign on ActBlue two days ago, with a humble goal of one thousand...

Daily Kos (www.dailykos.com)

So, again, there is definitely money in the fediverse.

Stefan Bohacek

@laurenshof @atomicpoet Or this one, going from $20k to +$40k in a few hours.

Christine Lemmer-Webber (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Well I am awake and finally at my computer and you know last night the @spritely campaign was at just under $20k and lemme just refresh it this morning I hope we finally made it over that line and https://spritely.institute/donate/ oh my GOD WOW THANK YOU

social.coop (social.coop)

Stefan Bohacek

@laurenshof @atomicpoet Well, just to add another data point:

Stefan Bohacek (@[email protected])

I'm curious, if you had to roughly estimate your donations to mutual aid requests from other members of the fediverse over the past year, how much would this add up to? #MutualAidMeta #donations #fediverse [ ] Less then a dollar [ ] $1-$5 [ ] $6-$10 [ ] $11-$50 [ ] $51-$100 [ ] $101-$500 [ ] $501-$1,000 [ ] $1,000+ [ ] I can't afford to donate [ ] I am not interested in donating [ ] I am not familiar with mutual aid requests [ ] Something else

Stefan's Personal Mastodon Server (stefanbohacek.online)

Arguably a much smaller sample (I forgot to set the length of the poll, so it only ran for a day), but 61% of the 150 people who voted made at least one donation to a mutual aid request on here.

Not too bad!