The platform/service is still in beta and opening up invites to its first users now.
The main developer is on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@reiver
Their webpage if you want to signup for early access: https://spacehost.live/
From what I’ve gathered, they intend to support a variety of fediverse platforms, but have started with lemmy with kbin close behind.
What are they getting income from? Are they wanting to run ads on your instance or something?
Nah … The piece missing here is that people pay them to manage a “self-hosting” situation. Basically, if you want to run an instance either for yourself as a single-user instance, or a small community, or maybe even a larger one, you pay them and they take care of a lot of the sysadmin stuff, including the cost of whatever cloud provider they’re using. Masto.host provide something similar for mastodon, and is fairly popular. These people are taking that idea and extending to a relatively comprehensive suite of platforms.
All of which, IMO, makes a lot of sense … specifically, taking the sys admin requirements out of hosting an instance democratises the community building that can be done by running an instance. More generally, creating more specialised roles and services in the fediverse, IMO, should improve its health and diversity.
Beyond all of that … I think this is a good idea they have. Basically, if a platform is in demand, an automatic donations system is built into their hosting service so that support goes back to the platform.
Ok so, the instance owner pays them to host, and with that revenue… They pay the instance owner back? Isn’t that just a “discount” with more steps?
No, they’re giving money back to the developers of the platform software, ie the devs of lemmy.
Is the platform open source?
No idea actually. You could ask them on mastodon. I’d bet not, or at least not yet.
Let us know if you get a reply?
