Re: CohostDidya know that hosting data on the public internet is pretty expensive? Especially if you try and go "Webscale!" right away. When you're hosting public websites with images and text, doing it *well* has lot of costs. (see also, Cloud Islan...
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Re: Cohost
Didya know that hosting data on the public internet is pretty expensive? Especially if you try and go "Webscale!" right away.
When you're hosting public websites with images and text, doing it *well* has lot of costs. (see also, Cloud Island, which @aurynn has been exceptionally good at sharing the infrastructure costs for an in-region, HA Mastodon instance)
Burning cash at negative margin is the norm of most tech startups, but isn't sustainable for community infrastructure.
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#Convene has taken a different path.
We strive for sales revenues that are ~3x costs of sales. i.e. $.33 in hosting costs == $1 in sales revenue.
That's enough to keep the lights on, but still means we depend on our community of contributrs for support, design, and development.
At 3x COGS, we would need ~$125k/yr in gross sales to pay a single staff member the median per-capita income in Oakland, CA.
At 10x COGS, we would need $83k in gross sales.
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So as you can imagine, things move slow.
But our first client owner (#Piikup) just made two sales on their eCommerce site!
So hopefully in the next couple years we'll be at the point where we can push towards enough revenue to actually pay a community development + support professional to help us out.
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Anyway, if you are interested in supporting a sustainable, long-term project that plants regionally owned and operated data cooperatives with an emphasis on economic interdependence, mutual aid, and mutual benefit consider contributing to our community #OpenCollective https://opencollective.com/zinc-community#category-CONTRIBUTE
Sure, we ain't a microblogging platform (because omg the cost to benefit ratio is whack on those) but we do offer high-benefit/low-cost systems that help communities break free from extractive tech.
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What some people building software don't understand is that, no, you don't need to go webscale right away.
It's perfectly okay for your app to not have the capability to automatically scale out at the start, and it's perfectly okay if your site gets temporarily hugged to death when it gets popular.
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cache-on-GET
Now you've got two problems, hehe.
I've gone on about it before, and I will likely re-post it later — now that I don't have to post tiny chains of <500 chars apiece — but I feel like having features that abstract away the problem of bad/unoptimized code (like auto-scaling) just enable you to continue producing bad code because the pain is hidden.
But what do I know, I get called a graybeard already.
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@julian Oh sure, cache-on-read has its flaws...
And yea, there's a balance. It's allllll about the cost-of-benefits-provided.
It's not autoscaling that's the problem; it's that most of our industries economic decision making resides within the shartup economic model of "raise $$$ to piss it away!"
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@Zee what's a "data cooperative"?
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@esoterra A data cooperative is a democratic organization which stewards the data provided by it's community of members.
See also:
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@Zee a little feedback - we followed the link and couldn't figure out, what the project really wants to do. There were a lot of buzzwords, but very little concrete descriptions. Also, a web search for Zinc Community didn't give any useful results.
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@OskarImKeller yep, we are bad at marketing. Mostly look through the #Convene or #ZincCoop hashtags for stuff.