On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    11·
    20 days ago

    $5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still… Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?

    • Kissaki@beehaw.orgEnglish
      7·
      20 days ago

      I’ve always been surprised by cost numbers mentioned in services and donation requests.

      I run my own cheap server which has game servers running in the past, and some other services. I’ve not run any busy services though or fediverse content so I never felt like I could make a reasonable assessment. Just be surprised.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        7·
        19 days ago

        Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
            3·
            19 days ago

            I used to run such things on my NAS/Server at home (And I still do, though I’m currently changing some things.) But in addition to the 4.50€ for ~20W of electricity, it was maybe 600€ for the machine, so another 5€ a month over 10 years. And then my internet contract is a bit more expensive because I need an IPv4 address which can do port forwarding… On the flipside, I can just attach a 10TB harddrive and have it available everywhere. And that’d be very expensive with a cloud service or hoster.

            • mesa@piefed.socialEnglish
              2·
              19 days ago

              Sounds like a good setup. I have the equivalent of a raspberry pi haha.

              Energy is extremely expensive where I’m at.

  • t3rmit3@beehaw.org
    1·
    19 days ago

    At this point, you’re better of self-hosting, or even co-lo hosting. Cloud environments are good when you need to scale faster than servers can be shipped (or plan to scale down before the costs add up), but $5k a month is literally a new, decently-beefy server every 2-3 months.

    In terms of solving the money issue, I feel like the only solution is a shared-cost/ shared-ownership model, where you get an initial pool of money together for the initial build-out, and then monthly costs are divided equally among all members. You can’t rely on donations, you need collectivism.