I’m pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?
Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
Wow, such transparency… that’s awesome. I wonder (hope) if there will be a massive spike in donations in June.
/me sets alarm to remind me to donate after work since I keep thinking about it while I’m away.
Ya, no kidding. This piqued my interest, but I did not click expecting to see an actual cost basis! I have been looking at potentially setting up my own node, but at the same time… Perhaps contributing here, financially as well, could be the best option.
Still fun to play around with my own stuff though :) Thanks guys!
He is a Dutchie, that must be why.
I have a small, private Lemmy site, a personal Calckey site, and some blogs that I run off of a VPS that I pay like $13/month for. The server is overkill by an order of magnitude for what I’m using it for. Based on current usage, I could support a few hundred active users without ever taking a dime from anyone, though I’m sure media expenses don’t scale well. That said, there are collective media projects like Jortage out there that have the potentially to significantly reduce media hosting costs for small sites.
😍
Cool info. Thanks for posting that.
I think I can help with that!
Basically it’s donations and own investments 👌🏻♥️ I run quite a lot of free services, mstdn.social and Masto.ai are the biggest I think but most of it gets covered by donations via various channels.
The rule is: people may only donate when they can miss it, we don’t wanna cause any problems with people!
Just a little fun thing: if every local user would donate 1 cent each month we would get more in donations than our total costs are😅
Ofc this doesn’t happen but some people can donate and other can’t!
I’m on mastodon.art and donate $1/m, same story. It’s only a handful of people that donate (hundreds, but still - much smaller than the thousands of users) and we cover the bill.
Though, this is also why i’m experimenting with custom Fediverse instance software that prioritizes low cost operation. I think Fedi would be better off if it wasn’t a huge lift to figure out hosting. There’s enough challenges in hosting instances, it would be nice to reduce as many as possible.
To me this is a very valid concern – as I understand the rough breakdown, reddit costs about $0.12 per active user per month to operate, times about 4 million active users in any given month equals a little under $500k per month in hosting costs.
I think it’s possible that this will be manageable within the Fediverse (i.e. not a growth-impeding-beyond-a-certain-point problem), but I do think it’s likely to be a significant issue. I am actively working on a little project that I hope will be able to make it possible to run an instance with much reduced hosting costs.
(Also, I noticed that I accidentally referred to reddit in the past tense in my first paragraph which I take as a positive sign.)
(Also, I subscribed to Ruud’s and Dessalines’s Patreons, have you? 🙂)
Im on a different small mastodon server and our admin expects about $0.14 per user per month.
Which makes reddits api pricing disgusting
$0.14 per user per month is… Higher than I expected.
I see four options:
- Server owner assumes all costs of the server. Possible if instance is not huge (ideal on a federated environment) or owner has money and will to do it.
- Accept donations from users
- Require paid subscription to access (and thus becoming private otherwise anyone could still access the server from a free instance)
- Run ads on site. Same as 3, users would migrate.
So I only see 1 and 2 possible
I run a personal instance with only two human users and a couple of accounts each (admin and daily use). I use a DigitalOcean droplet with 2gb of memory and 80Gb of storage. With a dozen or so communities, my disk usage since July 4 is at about 12gb.
My total monthly cost with weekly backups is about $14 USD. If the storage demands keep going up, my cost will increase to about $19/month
My personal (extremely small) instance with only a few users currently costs around $8 / month on a VPS. Still have plenty of headroom for more users as well I believe.
Yeah, I have wondered also… Just like if I wanted Usenet access I would expect to pay for it… There are costs involved, so how much?
That really depends on how many users and communities you have. It can be in single digits for small servers and hundreds (or even thousands) for the bigger ones. And everything in between for medium-size servers.
Lemmy world is taking donations via https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
