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

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.

Emelia 👸🏻

@esk @mekkaokereke @dma we're definitely not all working 32/hr/wk on hachyderm.. but that number rises and falls as we work on things, it's not continuous

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma yup - since this was esk's hypothetical dream staffing model where we can do many great things for the hachyderm, i modeled it after what i'd consider a minimally viable team running a globally available production service. imo, that's eight people so there's sufficient degrees of freedom to take on 1-3 epics, have a reasonable oncall rotation, and provide plenty of space for holidays, contribute to upstream mastodon/other projects, etc.

could we do it with one or two people, sure. but that isn't a team.

dominic :verified_paw:

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke so if every active user gave us $5 a month we'd be pretty close to staffing a team.

that's surprisingly achievable. time to run some "for the price of a coffee month..." banners!

in case it's not clear I'm not suggesting this for realsies, but I am pleasantly surprised by how little, relatively, it would take to start paying folks for their time.

Esk 🐌⚡💜

@thisismissem @puppygirlhornypost2 @risottobias @mekkaokereke @dma

from an overall outbound bandwidth perspective, we generally use about 22-23TB. our "custom CDN" is hosted in linode, and is a handful of VMs running nginx. with the linodes (VMs) we're running, we get an allotment of 20 TB/mo egress for "free" (as in we paid for the VMs). the 2-3 TB overage usually costs us an extra $10-15/mo.

in digital ocean, as of this morning we have 19.1 TB in media. we do **not** have a retention/sweep policy in place for deleting old media; this is something for us to consider in the future as a cost containment mechanism.

we also store 7 TB of database backups. we hold 14 days of database backups (weekly full, daily differential based on that full). this is probably a very conservative posture and could be optimized, but we reeeeealllly don't wanna lose the database.

you're spot on that, if you're hosting your own edge, in-memory caching is critical for both responsiveness back to your consumer and happiness of your servers to avoid over-saturation.

Raphael Lullis

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma

https://communick.com offers Mastodon + Lemmy + Matrix+ Funkwhale for $29 PER YEAR, yet it struggles to get enough people interested to cover its hosting costs, let alone my labor.

Is it really bad marketing on my part?

Jenniferplusplus

@lmorchard @mekkaokereke
That might be a nice thing to do, but I'm less bothered by this particular problem. For a couple reasons:

1. It's a ridiculous problem to have in the first place. If every instance in the entire fediverse requests that page in the span of 5 minutes, that's still only ~100 requests per second.
2. The correct solution is to attach verifiable signatures to og data, so that it can be forwarded with confidence. Not to make the whole rest of the web use a big shared cache.

dominic :verified_paw:

@raphael @esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke not necessarily. I think folks have a hard time understanding the value of services. especially when they're open source. people are terrible at value judgements generally.

Raccoon🏳️‍🌈

@lispi314 @craignicol @dalias @mekkaokereke
I want to note something, as the person in charge of moderation on a major server: there is a lot that can be done and hasn't with non-AI based automated moderation. Why is there not a feature built into Mastodon to...

- automatically report posts with racial slurs when they show up?

- automatically report when a user posts the same link several times in a row?

- automatically report when a user from your instance has been mentioned or linked on a hashtag like FediBlock?

- remind users of the report button when they get PMs that might be potential harassment?

We don't need AI. It would be wasteful, very costly, and likely have serious trust and reliability issues. We just need better systems to be built in by default to help us volunteers catch things quickly.

Rupert

@dma @raphael @esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke If as a society we better understood the cost of "free" we wouldn't be in this exact mess.

Asta [AMP]

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] you know, this really puts the old "twitter doesn't make any money" arguments into perspective (in that their argument wasn't that Twitter doesn't make any money so much as it was "Twitter doesn't make money hand over fist for the capitalist backers like they want it to").

I still hear some variation about "fedi needs monetization!" and my first instinct is no, for a ton of reasons, but it's also nice to know that in theory, things can work out just fine and people can get paid for their time without forcing advertising or VC backing down people's throats.

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

1. where are you incorporated?

2. in which country are your servers?

3. is this a solopreneur or there’s an actual team, with lawyers?

cannot impress enough upon #fediverse people how lack of an actual business team is a non-starter.

personally, country jurisdiction over your servers is the biggest issue. the fascists coming in will impound domains and blackhole sites even if the courts say they can’t.

cruelty & bankruptcy will be the point.

@dma @raphael @esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke

Raphael Lullis

@blogdiva @dma @esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke

The servers are in Germany, where I live.

Company is incorporated in the USA, because to be honest I am not ready to deal with German bureaucracy until I have meaningful revenue - which is yet to come.

mekka okereke :verified:

@aud @thisismissem @esk @dma

Facts.

The above post is much deeper and more profound than it might seem.

I want people to read it again, and really understand it.

When an Open Source or volunteer based initiative offers a similar service to a VC backed startup or publicly traded company, the odds can seem insurmountable, because the VC backed company budgets are astronomical. But... their budgets also include the need to both generate profit, and to grow at an exponential rate.

Customer acquisition is *usually* very expensive. But if you don't also have that same need to generate profit, or grow at an exponential rate, then you can operate at a similar quality, for a fraction of the cost.

"‍️ Meh. I don't care about hypergrowth, and I don't care about making a billion dollars." Is ironically, a devastatingly powerful *competitive* statement. It kills giants.

But you have to believe that all this is true, to fully unlock your mind to then believe that you can create something of similar quality. Because if you don't truly believe this, then you instead tell yourself things like, "I don't deserve good UX in my product, because I don't have $200MM in funding." This is self-defeating excuse making.

Mastodon is a unique "business" in that its customer acquisition cost is effectively negative.

Because the most successful Mastodon marketing campaigns, are negative "customer attrition campaigns" paid for and run by their competitors, that drive away their own customers, like Sonic losing his rings. They pay good money to drive their own customers to BlueSky and Mastodon.‍️

Johannes Ernst

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma

These are really interesting numbers, thanks for publishing them!!

Johannes Ernst

@esk @thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma I believe Twitter before the acquisition had revenue of about $3/MAU/month, which is broadly consistent with your numbers.