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Esk 🐌⚡💜 (@esk@hachyderm.io)
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.
Yes. Communities cannot exist without community members.
In the grand scheme of things, community members are individually easier to replace than those keeping the service running. E.g, take any community with more than a few hundred users and lose half of them, randomly. Now, take half of the instance admins. More likely than not, the instance will simply stop existing.
And then the people will move elsewhere
Isn’t that the point of federation, to be able to use another node if needed?
No. Being able to move is an advantage compared to centralized platforms, but it is not the “point” of it. It makes the system overall more robust, but it doesn’t guarantee or protect the individuals that are part of it.
Do you think that the world wide web would reach the size that it has today if websites had such a short shelf-life? Of course not. It would remain just a geeky curiosity, just like Lemmy or Mastodon. There is a reason why Bluesky is adding one million users per week while we are here counting the same dozen of active people since summer 2023. People generally do not care about how the system works, they just want to something that helps them achieve their goals or solves their problems.
I know you like hyperboles, but Bsky’s growth slowed quite a bit:
The main reason it’s much more successful than Mastodon is content discoverability
Agreed. And the problem Reddit and Lemmy solve is becoming a niche issue
What a silly remark. Yeah, of course (percentage-wise) they slowed down. Do you think that would see 190% growth every month?
You are talking about the symptoms, but you are ignoring the diagnostic. The reason that Bluesky has a superior product at the moment is because they HAVE MONEY. They can go and hire people, they can invest in infrastructure, they can spend on marketing, they can go cut out deals with other service providers.
Meanwhile, the Mastodon devs are all sharing the belief that they are saints who are working “for the community”. Sorry, it’s not enough. We are not going to amount to much if our ambitions are that low.
It doesn’t matter the format. This is not (specifically) about Reddit, or Twitter, or Instagram or TikTok.
This is a discussion about a model that can keep sustainable development and operations of an open web. ActivityPub as whole allows us to think in much broader terms than “replacing Reddit” or "replacing Youtube. The format of “popular social media” may change, but the fact that people will always have an interest in consuming, creating and sharing content will always be there.
Humans are not interchangeable components… that’s a disgusting take, honestly…
Every community I’ve been in can feel through loss in some way, of a member.
This attitude is exactly why you cannot fathom why maybe small instances, ran by volunteers for the community is a viable concept.
Its also why BBSes started their death spiral: people trying to commoditize the community.
We are talking about different things. Very different things.
I am not saying that small communities are not viable. I am saying that without substantial financial support, all we are going to get is small communities, and we are not going to be able to compete with the corporate mainstream.
If your ambition is just to keep some obscure corner of the internet, fine. If you want to take back the internet away from Google/Facebook/Microsoft/Reddit, then we need to get a lot more help than just a dozen people pitching in to cover server bills. It will require work. It will require coordination. It will require resilience. It will require sacrifices.
Being upset at Zuckerberg, or making campaigns to “Boycott Threads” is not going to do anything if our side is orders of magnitude smaller than theirs. They will still be exploiting their users. And even if you personally don’t use it, or your “community” doesn’t use it, there are still plenty of people that I care about that do.
I dunno if I speak for everyone else, but all we need are small.communities.
We are not “competing” with anyone or anything.
That’s the root of your issue, and it’s based on a false premise.
You are definitely not speaking for the billions of people that are still in the large networks. Do you think they prefer to use Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/TikTok because it’s somehow better, or because of network effects?