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.
  • rglullisAEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.

    What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.

    We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community

    No one can use your content to pay their bills.

    We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit

    The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.

    Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?

    It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.

    There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.