I just went through seven motherboard, three power supplies and two i9-10980xe CPU's to find a stable combination of hardware for my instance, so forgive me if I'm not too keen on paying for someone else's.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Seriously. If this is your main instance, set up monthly donations. Even if it's just 1$/£/€ or whatever. Times 16k that's $16,000+/month. I donate to mine every month.
The fediverse is free because someone else is paying for it out of their own pocket. Not because they're collecting and selling your private data. So do your part. It's for the greater good and the freedom of the internet.
I mean, unrealistic to get anything close to all active users donating. Nobody should be expecting to setup an instance an expect tens of thousands of dollars a month.
As an indie dev back in the day, it's a fraction of uses are willing to fork anything at all.
If anything, if you're a whale, go big on your individual donation if you want a large impact.
Either way, you shouldn't need that much money to cover server costs for a mere 16,000 users.
I understand your point. But, I don't think anyone here is creating instances in the hopes of collecting money. They're just trying to keep the internet free (as in speech). And no, it probably doesn't cost that much for a server with 16k users, but it still costs something and someone is paying for that out of pocket.
We have to understand that we're at a crossroads right now. Most of the internet is dominated by GAFAM and they control the access to information and how it's provided. They control the narrative and have a huge bias in favor of unfettered capitalism and fascism. They not only use your own personal information for profit, but hey also benefit from government subsidies paid by taxpayers.
Meanwhile you have a government that's increasingly cutting funding for almost everything, including important organizations that fund critical open source projects.
If we want a free (as in speech) internet, we have to understand it comes at a cost and we can't rely on governments to fund these projects. It's up to us to put our money where our mouth is.
I'm by no means a whale. But, if us little fishes all band together, we can become even bigger than a whale.
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Rent comes before server. An outage is a wonderful motivator, turn that shit off.
I assume he's applying donations to the server costs first, then considers extra as profit/salary. We should be considering developer time as a core part of server costs, but I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
I think one of the best thing hosts could do is be transparent about costs and how much time maintenance takes and what sort of effective wage they are getting.
I think people would react poorly if server donations went to personal expenses before server expenses.
The distinction is an illusion. If a person can't afford to live, and a part of their life is running a server, who gives a fuck which dollar goes where?
(Other than all the dipshits who offer 0 and demand anything more than nothing.)
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So? Do, or don't. Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running, or it doesn't and goes under.
Altruism doesn't pay the bills; but it doesn't hurt to ask. Can't blame them for that.
Yeah, so he's asking.
Either their service provides people with enough value to donate to keep it running
You know what also works like that? Any other traditional business operation.
I am saying that since 2022: we only have a shot at this succeeding if we all start putting something at stake.
Are yall not sponsoring this project on patreon or otherwise?
I pitch in something like 1-2 bucks to desalines and a few bucks to .world every month.
You are the exception, and you will find out that even the most prolific participants here claiming that $5 per year is enough to cover the hardware costs, so he doesn't see any reason to give more than that.
If you see this go to the patreon rn and sign up for like, $1 a month.
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Context for people reading this: https://feddit.org/post/2600584
Summary of the answers:
- lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
- a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
Recent discussion I had with rglullis: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812/17448295
For lemmy.world / mastodon.world including some of the smaller instances we host, it's like 0,06 euro per active user per month. If every active user would pay 2 Euro per year that would be enough to cover hosting costs. If every active user would pay 1 euro per month, I could quit my dayjob and focus on the Fediverse fulltime.
(Sidenote: Stux and I created the non-profit Fedihosting Foundation which owns lemmy.world .. but finances are still separate for his and my instances)
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What do you mean "so?" Maybe it does provide enough value. Not enough people know that they have to pay real money to keep the servers running. Thus the request...
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I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.
I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people's servers.
Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?
I'm running my instance for the same reason, it's been running for over a year and I'm the only active user. Although there's people passively using it as well.
Storage doesn't go over 100GB much. The only downside I notice is a community on Lemmy is only federated if at least one of the users is subscribed to it. Using Lemmy-federate you can add a bot account that subscribes to new communities.
You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn't en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I'm just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage. I already pay for that regardless as I use it for other things. Though ideally I would not want to allocate more than 500Gb for a one person instance, idk how reasonable would that be.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you'll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
And now that I'm wondering things I wonder how feasible would it be to host very small instances on cheap devices like sbc or cheap mini-pc. Maybe aiming for thousands of instances with a few dozen people in each instead of a few dozen of instances with thousand of people in them.
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We need more peer to peer hosting
That would be nice, but the cost of hosting is not the issue. The problem is that people expect to have free software being developed and services being offered but they don't want to pay for the labor of developers and admins.
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It's already there - it's called hyphanet ( old freenet ). It works really well removing the need being always online but it's not popular because of no mobile clients
@[email protected] my honest recommendation is to switch to the plain text only mode and disable file / media upload if it's possible. Hosting plain text data is cheap. Let them share links only to their cdns, servers or ipfs for media
Again: hosting costs is the least of the concerns. The problem is that users are not willing to pay for the labor of admins.
I don't think you understand what a volunteer service is
I understand it pretty well. What I don't understand is why some people only want to participate here if it means they can get to free ride on "volunteers".
In a sibling comment, you say "if providing the service is too much, the solution is to stop doing it". Fine, I fully agree with it. But do you realize that this implies that sooner or later we are going to run out of people with the capacity (or willingness) to do this work?
We are not talking about any small-time instance. It's the third largest instance by active user count. Above it, only mastodon.social and mstdn.jp. If the third largest instance has an admin that might have to stop providing the service in order to find another job so that they can make fucking rent, isn't that a sign that this is not sustainable?
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People are very willing to donate other's time
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The core argument here is should there be an expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs.
Personally, if an instance is run off of donations, then it's a nice to have. As an admin, you shouldn't have that expectation. If you no longer want to volunteer your time, then don't. Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
I'm also okay with paid instances and admins trying to make a reasonable salary or even making additional profit as long as it's transparent to the users. It's their choice to charge, it's our choice to pay.
Overall, instances should be run by a group of volunteers, not a single individual. Otherwise, the long term viability of the instance is questionable.
This is one of the things that make me think the current "fediverse" isn't going to be its final form. It's a good stepping stone, but users and communities being locked to a single instance will become a bugbear sooner rather than later.
My local Madison insurance is forming a steering committee and has created an LLC. (I'm a member of the committee.) We will solicit donations, because mostly it has been one guy paying for a small regional instance of about 100 AU.
We think of it like public broadcasting, like PBS. I will be happy to kick in a few dollars per month to pay for it. We have contests, online meetups, and other fun. It's not just Mastodon, it's an active regional online community, and it's worth it.
(I also donate to my Lemmy instance, because it's worth it too!)
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expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs
Not quite that. The argument is that admins shouldn't be treated as a disposable entity who don't need any money just because they are not directly asking for it.
It's a "I want you to want to do the dishes" kind of thing.
Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
Easier said than done. We already have a long list of instances that disappear suddenly because the admins burned out, and I have had long discussions with admins from other instances who keep begging for more donations every month instead of just saying "you know what? You don't want to help me, so I don't owe your lot anything".
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I can send you the full 274 on the 1st but I cannot use PayPal. If we can figure out a different way for me to get you the money hmu
Their post listed 5 other options.
Jesus Christ I know I need glasses but they're RIGHT THERE in my face too. Thank you lmfao
No worries, shoulda gone to Specsavers ;)
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