Fediverse

Lol, I run multiple FOSS services online, two of which have thousands of MAUs. I consider myself lucky to be even covering the hardware costs at this point. I would love to even make an extra 500 Eur per month for myself given the amount of time I spend doing sysadmin, automation, PR, development and just being an active part of the communities.

We really need to change in what people consider valuable and how little actually is needed to help. Like literally, all you need to do is spare 1$ per month on your social media that is your primary home. If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.

meta makes 156B per year, assuming 3.98B users per year (average monthly active users). that's about 39$ revenue per user per year and 3.2$ per user per month.

If you want to make that kind of money, i think they only realistic option adding ads with an option to pay to disable the ads. i never saw a open source project raises that kind of money with fundraising. even then i am not sure it will work because i think i read a report that people who block ads basically don't read them when they can't block so those ads will make no money.

I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:

• Twitter wanted $10
• I know about 1% of users donate
• I like having an independent instance run by people I feel ideologically aligned with.

For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.

I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It's so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I'm still going to pay for independent social media because it's worth it.

Yeah host-ers on the fediverse are not making money that's for sure.

I self host a number of fedi systems. Mastodon used to be the most "costly" in terms of CPU and storage.

That seems super expensive, and/or some bad math like 4 users on a paid server.

Edit: gets accused of gaslighting by OP... Stay classy! Still Super expensive BTW.

9$/month to send toots? Really?