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.
Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.
I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.
Thank you
Time to start putting ads in.
Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.
I’d rather have a… gags… Subscription.
Yup. As jerry illustrated, this shit isn’t free.
No ads and no donations, they’ll put wishful thinking into the skillet and eat that I guess
Donations, subscriptions, etc are definitely fine. They are not invasive fuckery that inflict themselves on people without consent, nor do they seep into the space in a commercial manner. Ads do not respect consent and they fundamentally force commerce into every place that they touch.
Ads are the root of the rot in the www.
I support ads.
Oh, calm down. I don’t support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.
And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.