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.
  • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    21 hours ago

    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?

    • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
      11·
      20 hours ago

      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.

      • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
        1·
        14 hours ago

        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.

        • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
          1·
          5 hours ago

          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.

          Survivorship Bias

          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.

          • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
            1·
            57 minutes ago

            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.

            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.

            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.

            • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
              1·
              18 minutes ago

              My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.

              Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.

              Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not "oh, I really want to get my book in the local library. They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.

              To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their “main business” and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.