Have you tried running any of the alternatives for more than a few hundred users?

Mastodon is bad for small and single-user instances because it wasn’t designed to serve so few people. Once it starts growing beyond a certain level of activity, most of your overhead is on sidekiq/redis side of things.

I’ve seen the Pleroma devs openly saying that their service can not handle more than 20k users, because they rely on the database to build the timeline and they don’t have a strong caching system.

So yeah, there are a bunch of tradeoffs and Mastodon is not trying to optimize for anything in particular. But once it reaches a certain size the operational cost (per user) does go down.

Mimic what paid online news does

I could easily write an essay connecting the rise of populism and the fall of civic society to our loss of real journalism, and another 1000-word post arguing that paywalls are just a bad band-aid trying to cover the deep wound caused by eyeball chasing “infotainment”.

These “fake” paywalls are just an attempt from the news publishers to have both ways and make revenue both from the paying customers and the ones that may be okay with ads.

Also, if the admin deserves compensation for their time, why don’t I get a pretty penny for this?

People love to hate the Brave browser, but their system pays 70% of the revenues to the end user. If you manage to convince more people to use it, it would be perfect. End users would get some $ from accepting the ads and they could kick some of that back to the sites they wish to support. The whole economy could grow and everyone would have their incentives aligned.

You know what the problem is? People were looking at the 2-5 bucks of crypto tokens that they would get and instead of using them to stimulate the economy they would just hang on them for the speculation of profit. Individual greed and penny-pinching turned one of the most viable alternatives into another tool for crypto grifters.

My mention of drugs/booze/cigarettes is completely non-judgemental. I am not saying that is bad if people spend money on that. I am just pointing out that, yes,.some people do spend money on it and they are not expecting to keep partaking in their pleasures for free.

Reddit is having trouble monetizing

They do not. They are making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue with their advertising.

We have no tools against capitalism.

Trade and commerce that prioritizes small business is already a big weapon against globalism and Corporatist Capitalism.

Focusing on closed-loop, sustainable economies is a tool against Capitalism.

Community-led investing that prioritizes long-term wealth building is a tool against rent-seeking enterprises that stimulate zero-sum games.

You are definitely underestimating the number of broke people here.

If I am, then the discussion should be “how can we have a sustainable system that gives a fair wage to those working on it , while not stressing those who can not afford even 2 bucks per month?” instead of this “you can not charge from everyone because you are not empathizing.”

Once we reframe the discussion, we should be able to propose things like:

• “pay it forward” systems, where those who can afford more pay for those who can not. Let them become responsible for who to invite. (I have implemented this at Communick, by the way, and so far I had only two people paying for others.)

• Selling ad space for ethical businesses. Back in 2007 there used to be a network of bloggers who did not want to pollute their pages with adSense, so they got together and created a system where companies would pay $5k to $10k to have one slot and all bloggers committed to display this banner during the whole month. Something like that could be done here as well, if “making money” wasn’t such a capital sin.

• focus on making this normie-friendly. Stop with the political bickering and organize the topic-specific instances (which I already offered for other admins), use them to attract a larger audience so that we have more “actually I can pay a few bucks per month” crowd to dilute the “I am anti-establishment but I can not afford to fight against it” crowd that seems to dominate so far.

The latter.

You of all people here should know that the cost of running the service is not the real issue. Even if Mastodon takes 3x as much hardware to run as Lemmy, the cost of hardware is still pennies per user.

Mastodon because it is the largest number of instances and users, but the principle is the same. It hasn’t happened with Lemmy yet because this subset of the Fediverse is ridiculously small compared to Mastodon/Pixelfed

expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs

Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn’t be treated as a disposable entity who don’t need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.

It’s a “I want you to want to do the dishes” kind of thing.

Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.

Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying “you know what? You don’t want to help me, so I don’t owe your lot anything”.

Once again you are using points on the extreme end of the distribution curve and trying to pass it as the median case.

Also: pirating is an act of moral rebellion, not of lack of means to afford the shitty product offered by the movie industry

Or their games. Or their booze/drugs/cigarettes. Or their whatever they spend their money on without questioning the one providing the goods why they want to charge for it.

Btw, just gave 10$ to my instance today

Good on you! Now, let’s get that to become the norm for everyone else.

I think that the crux of the matter is about whether or not we see this as “just a hobby” or if we really see an investment in the Fediverse as the best alternative that we have for an open (I am not going to say “free” to avoid confusion) web that can take power away from Big Tech and back to the people.

We need the instances run by volunteers.

Why? Are you going to tell me that the 98% of non-paying users are struggling so much with their finances that they can not afford to pay a couple of bucks per month to an admin?

If the numbers were reversed and we had 2% of the people saying “sorry, I really can not afford this. Can I have access still?” I would be a lot more understanding. Hell, the number could go up to even 20% and I wouldn’t mind opening a few free accounts…

But 98%? I can bet that the most if not all find a way to pay for Netflix, or Spotify, or their games but $2.50 a month is suddenly too much for ninety-and-eight percent of the people?

Ah, are you saying you don’t want to do this for free?

Is it really?

Do you think it’s quantifiable?

I can go and say “my work as an admin is worth $XX,XXX/month, so this is how much I’d like to get paid to do it”. Now, some people will agree with it and pay for it. Some will not, and will look for some cheaper alternative.

If more admins went to on to adopt a similar approach and stipulated first how much their work is worth before even setting up an instance and if users went on to refuse the offer, what would they do?

• Putting themselves through the trouble to set up an instance for themselves?
• Pay a professional to do it for them?
• Go to Reddit?

Can you go around and say “my work as an user of Lemmy (or Reddit, or LinkedIn) is worth $YY per post, or $ZZ,ZZZ per month, and this is how I’d like to get paid to do it?”

Will anyone take you on your proposal?

And if admins refused to accept your offer, what do you think they would do?

• Find other sources of “content”?
• Pay other professionals to generate content for them?
• Go To Reddit?

As a data point: I may have stopped the alien.top mirroring bots, but I am still running them locally to browse Reddit content. To this day, the niche communities I used to sub there have more interesting content than anything here. So don’t think that whatever we are posting here is worth anything.

Well, it’s very easy to be the armchair expert and say how much better you’d do it. It’s another thing entirely to actually do it. You are free to prove how smart and competent you are by showing him how to do better.

In any case, it’s irrelevant to the discussion. Like I said, if people are only giving him the money to cover the hardware costs, even if it was brought down the cost to zero he would still be working for free to all the 16k users of the instance.

Read again, he is not asking to pay the server bills. It’s 1400€ (so, less than $0,10/active user/month) and he got it fully covered.

You can cut that 5x. You can cut that 10x. You can cut that 100x. It doesn’t matter. You can bet that if he brought down the prices to zero there would still be people saying “why are you asking for money then, it doesn’t cost you anything to run it!” and at the end of the month, he will still be short to make rent.

I understand it pretty well. What I don’t understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on “volunteers”.

In a sibling comment, you say “if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it”. Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?

We are not talking about any small-time instance. It’s the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn’t that a sign that this is not sustainable?

• the fact that you think that “creating a business” is bad says more about you than me. And I don’t want a business “just for me”. I am looking for a sustainable way where many people can work in tech and create technology that does not exploit the users, but this will never happen if the people working are expected to do it from free and still figure out how to make rent.
• not quite, see above. I don’t particularly care about the individuals and I certainly wish to change the prevailing culture. I am not here to have any significant impact on people individually and I am not concerned about “being nice”. I do care about finding one platform that can be sustainable and universally accessible, though.
• no, but I think that the LW users do have the resources to allow Ruud to work full-time on Fediverse stuff, but for some reason there are 18k users there who think it is okay to exploit his free labor.
• pick a lane: do you think that “community building” is a job, or not? Are you participating here as a service to others or do you out of personal enjoyment? If you want to be paid for it, then state your value and tell me how much you think your work is worth.

And each one of them should be commended for having a better understanding of ethics than you and all others who are only interested in participating if they can exploit free labor.

Yeah, you made it clear that you:

• do not value the work of the admins
• can only see meaning in a “free” social media platform if it means “free of charge”
• think that a small business provider providing hosting for open source systems is as bad as Big Tech/Corporate/VC funded ones
• see volunteered work as as opportunity to excuse yourself from giving a meaningful contribution
• think you should be paid for participating

unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating

It is quite realistic to get 100% of your users to pay. Just make registration conditional on the payment.

$10, $20 or even the $29 per year that I charge at Communick is not a significant amount of money for the average user. It is mind boggling that we got so used to “free stuff” offered by Big Tech that now anyone saying “Everyone using the service needs to pay for it” is seen as an heretic.

What is stopping an admin unwilling to “give away their labor for free” from doing so?

Again, you are going at this backwards.

Instead of asking yourself why the network can reach a few million users even when admins are unpaid, you should be wondering how much bigger the network would be if the current users appropriately invested in the ecosystem.

Yes, of course. Sysadmins, developers, moderators, Fediverse advocates, active posters, even commenters deserve something, as every of those roles make the platform alive.

Amazing. By equating the value of the work provided by admins and developers (which you can not do) to the work of “Fediverse advocates and active posters” (which you want to do) you create a false equivalence that you think excuses you from giving full credit to others.

You said you did not respond to the original statements because “it would take too much time”. Now, you spent more time trying to find a reasonable justification for your unwillingness to acknowledge the higher value of someone else’s contribution and you still didn’t give a straight out answer and resort to rhetorical tricks.

Where is this money we supposedly all deserve going to come from?

First: who is “we”, here? Are you really implying that you should be getting money by participating?

Second: the money exists. You and many others can pay $10-20 / year for the service being provided to you. The problem is that you (and many others) do not want to acknowledge the value of the work and refuse to contribute beyond “covering the cost of hardware”.