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Esk 🐌⚡💜 (@[email protected])
hachyderm.io@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 :blobfoxlaugh:
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.
Meta does a lot more than manage a Mastodon server. A single full-timer is likely all that is needed. Two to reduce burnout. Those costs are still high, but you shouldn’t discredit the notion that eight full timers is an exaggeration. The top comments on the toot you link are the volunteers saying exactly that.
In practice, you’d need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.
So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.
18 months after the API debacle on Reddit, most of the instances are still around. If the model was not sustainable, wouldn’t have all closed?
Your question is as short-sighted as “If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?”
No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.
This logic would mean all nonprofits would fail. It’s flawed.
What do you mean? Even non-profits have income and pay salaries to the people working there.
If admins need more money, they can ask for help to their communities.
Lemmy.zip seems to be doing okay: https://lemmy.zip/post/29448608?scrollToComments=true
Lemm.ee had a question about a donation link and never answered https://lemm.ee/post/49850162?scrollToComments=true
I know a few instance admins who runs their instances on hardware they would be using anyway.
Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven’t seen such request ever.
Do you realize the issue with this reasoning? Here’s a hint.
You don’t see admins “asking for money” to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it’s not trying to take over Amazon, but that’s probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn’t realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that’s where the userbase and money is now.