I was trying to work out how much to donate to Kbin to keep the lights on. I read somewhere it costs something like $1/month per user?

Can we assume that 1/5 of users will be donating on a monthly basis?

So most people will be donating something like $5/month to cover the freeloaders and those that genuinely can’t afford it?

Does that seem about right?

I was surprised to see that only 190 out of ~5k users have so far donated:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

That maths doesn’t work does it?

I hope there’s a recurring payment option soon like Open Collective otherwise I’ll probably forget to donate next month.

  • SFaulken@kbin.social
    0·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got no issue kicking Ernest a fiver (and in fact I did), but part of the issue is, we shouldn’t be advocating for kbin.social or any of their other instances becoming the “Big Kahuna” That defeats half the purpose of being a federated protocol in the first place. Get a VPS of your own, spin up an instance, invite your friends and family, and spread the load. If you poke around, you can get a suitable VPS that can support a small number of users quite inexpensively.

    I don’t have mine up and running yet, but it’s in the works, as soon as I muddle through how.

    • Sam_uk@kbin.socialOP
      0·
      1 year ago

      The cost last month for a few hundred users will be 67/month.

      I suspect you could spend several thousand this month and still not keep up with demand.

      It’s a virtuous circle, the faster it is the more people come.

      • Kata1yst@kbin.social
        0·
        1 year ago

        For 6k users last month it cost €16/m

        For 121k users at the moment (according to the website statistics posted here) it will cost €67/m, though I think we can all agree the system is a bit under provisioned at present, despite using the largest instance provided by the VPS (edit: not entirely true, see @ajar7 's reply below).

        Assuming the truth is somewhere in between (I’m assuming the current state is ~30% under provisioned), and horizontal scaling will be both necessary and somewhat less efficient (I’m assuming ~40% less efficient than vertical scaling)

        It comes to something like €0.001 per month per user.

        At Wikipedia they get around 40,000 gifts of on average $15. They get something like 5.1B unique visits per month. That’s roughly $0.00012 per visit.

        The comparison seems to imply we need to get something like 10x the user/donor engagement of Wikipedia, which is very sobering.