"In 2024, it cost $N to run a Mastodon instance with ~1000 active users for a year.

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@jenniferplusplus @mekkaokereke I want to believe.

Y+: I've been tooting this horn for too long so I've kind of given up, but I think it's one of the highest priorities to resolve for admins as a whole... not very high for devs it seems tho so who knows.

Z+: akismet for AP (shared threat data).. SEO spam account has a common username/email/ip/URLs in profile/posts

A SEO spammer shoudn't be able to move from instance to instance... share that data around

Eashwar

@mekkaokereke I feel like pooling storage could be very useful since a lot of servers are storing copies of the same media (see jortage.com). Media storage, CDN, and transfer bandwidth make up a huge amount of cost in running servers.

Emelia 👸🏻

@e_nomem @mekkaokereke @esk could be interesting to experiment with operating something like jortage? Would probably need a webhook/events queue to setup tasks for checking contents uploaded (as to limit liability)

Les Orchard

@mekkaokereke Along with pooling storage, it'd probably make folks on the rest of the web happy if mastodon instances pooled opengraph / preview card fetches. Maybe through shared caching proxies or protocol tweaks. Anything to cut down the thundering herd every time a link is shared.

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem ah so prob a wash, eh?

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@mekkaokereke reading these posts.. I hope 2025 is the year of shared services on the fediverse.

shared community / co-operation services are not centralisation you zealots. Don't @ me.

{Insert Pasta Pun}

@shlee @mekkaokereke plus it could be "requires manual approval from somebody on your server"

like... server ABC limited domain 1. your server mods get notified and they can either agree or disagree.

Cassandrich

@craignicol @mekkaokereke No one is going to use an instance that abdicates moderation in favor of AI shit. Pattern recognition that cannot see and understand outside context cannot accurately moderate.

Cassandrich

@dave @mekkaokereke Refusing to cache local copies of large media. Downsampling it all to reasonable size. That's literally all there is too it. Bonus: you don't blow your users' mobile data quotas.

Jenniferplusplus

@mekkaokereke Actually, I should note that while I think it's important to cut the cost of running fediverse servers, there's only so much savings to be had.

I think it's more important to create ways for servers to generate revenue and be financially self-sufficient. And to do so without selling ads, because the incentive structures that advertising creates are anathema to the aspects of this place that are actually good.

I'm hoping it can be done with paid features.

Parsnicketty

@mekkaokereke @gkrnours that’s an interesting idea.

What if such a team triaged content that everyone* (*who I want to talk to) agrees is unacceptable like death threats, hate speech, CSAM, and then referred more nuanced problems to instance-specific mods?

There needs to be a way for people to learn moderating, do it for awhile, and then rotate out before they’re scarred for life.

craignicol

@dalias @mekkaokereke people accept instances with barely any moderation (well, a lot of instances defederate them, but they remain popular) and I'm sure threads will stay. It's not something I'll be comfortable with, but it's a trade-off people who don't feel threatened here might accept.

Cassandrich

@craignicol @mekkaokereke The horror of AI shit doing moderation is not false negatives but false positives. No one wants to be where they'll get randomly banned by opaque processes.

:PUA: Shlee fucked around and

@risottobias @mekkaokereke Bingo. the more instances the better for insights...

3 instances have this user suspended a user with this email.... for
* x reason
* z reason
* y reason
how do you want to proceed? etc etc

craignicol

@dalias @mekkaokereke I know people who had temporary bans from Facebook for unknown reasons but got reinstated and are still there. I don't see why that behaviour wouldn't be replicated here. If moderation isn't something you think about much, why would it matter to you if it was a faceless AI or a faceless minimum wage worker (or volunteer) that's deleted that one message in support of Harris?

Cassandrich

@craignicol @mekkaokereke On Facebook they stay because it's holding their social relationships hostage. On fedi there's no reason to stick with a shit instance that's at high risk of taking your social relationships away when there are plenty of good ones.

Nik

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma As a (non-Fedi) benchmark, Metafilter (/cc @jessamyn) costs about $250K a year, and most of that is moderator staff cost.

Profit & Loss - Google Drive

Google Drive (drive.google.com)

Renaud Chaput

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma the upgrade to Ruby 3.3 should have resulted in a 15% CPU improvement, from what I remember this was similar to what our switch to libvips did

LisPi

@dalias @mekkaokereke @craignicol To be fair, all server-centric options are at risk of taking relationships away randomly if they suffer catastrophic failure.

It's a pretty strong indictment of the model and Nomadic Identity protocols only mitigate some of the flaws.

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma so stats, based on dec 2024 exit run rate (rounded for simplicity):

#hachyderm costs about $1600/mo to run. this is up somewhat, as we've started to add some infra as part of our resilience plan announced in nov.

we currently have about:
- 55000 users
- 9700 MAU
- 3.7M toots

yielding:
- $.03/user/mo
- $.16/active user/mo
- $.0004/toot

from a raw compute & storage perspective.

again, this is based on 100% volunteer work. today, our mods and infra folk graciously donate their time to keep this thing going.

hypothetically, if we paid them, say, $120k USD/yr (chose this to make the math cleaner), that would add $10k/person/mo to the cost.

if we go with a staff of eight (mix of mod & infra), that adds $80k/mo to the run rate, for a total of $81,600/mo, yielding:

- $1.48/user/mo
- $8.41/active user/mo
- the toot figure is silly, so i'm not calculating it again

orders of magnitude of difference.

we could argue about the staff size - i went with roughly what we have today and assumed we made everyone full time so they could hachy for 32/hr/wk vs. calculating the number of hours we actually work. e.g. maybe we could it out at ~$4.50/user/mo, but still a multiple orders of magnitude bump from the raw infra cost.