Some Questions about the Fediverse

Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I’m curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

  1. What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?
  2. Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?
Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

Admin of a tiny instance with some somewhat active communities here. Monetary cost is almost zero because my lemmy instance runs on my own hardware. It uses around 250mb of ram and 50gb of storage which is pretty much nothing. Im currently not looking for any sort of donation

heygooberman,
@heygooberman@lemmy.today avatar

Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost? And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations? What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?

Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

Do you anticipate your instance eventually growing to the point where you would have to outsource your hosting and start taking donations to cover the cost?

I currently dont have open registration without me confirming every entry application so uncontrolled growth isn’t really possible. Ill probably close registration as soon as there are too many people for me to host the instance in my basement. I would probably set up a donation page if I paid more than like 30 bucks a month for hosting.

And do you believe donations would be enough to pay off the costs, given the voluntary and variable nature of donations?

Donations seem to work fine on big instances like lemmy.world . Not sure about smaller ones tho

What is your opinion of using ads to cover the cost of hosting?

I hate ads and everything that tries to shove them down my throat. Most people on lemmy are somewhat tech savy and are probably already using an adblock. So ill make the experience a lot worse for a small amount of people without adblock and wouldnt be getting much money.

kersploosh,
@kersploosh@sh.itjust.works avatar

lemmy.world reports monthly expenses around €1,200 per month, but they’re also running multiple other services for that expense. Those costs are all covered by donations.

Smaller Lemmy instances are much less expensive. I’ve seen admins comment that they pay anywhere from $40 to $300 per month.

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

im running a bare bones instance, just starting to get some users. i am using one of the higher cost providers in AWS, and my total costs are ~$1.02/day. i could probably get to about 25 users before i have to double these costs in the form of the next tier of hosting, but then i could probably scale to 250-500 users. for ~2$/day. i can imagine donations allowing me to scale to many thousands of users before the leecher/donation ratio tips.

its not that expensive, but then, i dont have a ton of leechers either.

attracting users? no idea. i hate social media. im here for the sysadminin'

elbarto777,

Why call your users leechers?

Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

what specs are you getting for 1 buck a day?

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

for the vm, its the ec2 T3a plus associated services (4Gb ram, burst processing)

Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

seems pretty overpriced imo

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

yes its at least double the cost of less mature providers

Oha,
@Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz avatar

are they doing anything special that justifies that price?

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

its amazon, they have an extremely mature ecosystem. so everything is stupid easy to setup and run (interoperate).

and dashboards are sooo pretty

ElectroVagrant,

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

This is a common question from newcomers, and it’s not necessarily a bad one, just worth being aware of this to better understand some of the responses you may see. Something else to keep in mind is that there is no collective, united Fediverse community in the way that you might sorta see on some bigger tech platforms (albeit even on those, there’s not really a singular community either).

What this means is that there’s no combined community effort from folks across the Fediverse to attract new users, and since it’s all loosely connected communities driving it all, there’s no market push to popularize them as you’re more apt to see from the tech industry. In fact, if you wander into some parts of the Fediverse, you’ll find some folks far happier to keep their communities small and to themselves for a variety of reasons, sometimes conflating the tech and their community (i.e. a popularization of Lemmy as tech wouldn’t mean their little Lemmy community instance had to link up with every other one).

That said, there are also plenty of folks around here interested in the question and planning/discussing drawing in more folks. Some of those discussions being about improvements to the technology to make it less jank and comfortable for less technically inclined users, others about how to present it without getting in the weeds of the tech details, and some just by trying to post interesting/entertaining content to keep folks interested past a glance. There’s as many ways to approach it as there are Fediverse communities, and so there’s not really been any one way that people have been going about it.

Ludrol,
@Ludrol@szmer.info avatar
  1. It depends. The majority cost is your time spend at troubleshooting. The electricity cost is couple dozen euro per month. (VPS or selfhost on your hardware)
simple,

What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?

Right now everything is funded through donations though it’s not clear how feasible that is in the long term. I wouldn’t be surprised if some instances run ads in the future.

Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse?

Maturation. It’s just that most Fediverse sites outside of Mastodon aren’t ready for prime time. Lemmy just recently started getting great apps and stabilization updates. Other projects like Kbin aren’t there yet. I think it’ll take time before the Fediverse has an easy onboarding process.

heygooberman,
@heygooberman@lemmy.today avatar

If we do have some instances running ads, wouldn’t that run counter to the goals of the Fediverse? It’s my understanding that much of the migration from Big Tech platforms to Fediverse platforms is to escape the intrusive nature of ads and to prevent the Big Tech companies from taking user data and giving it to advertisers, something that is a major privacy concern these days.

simple,

If we do have some instances running ads, wouldn’t that run counter to the goals of the Fediverse?

Not really. You can always switch to another instance, and there’s a big difference between running few ads to stay afloat and being a for-profit company like other social media. The Fediverse would still be by the community, for the community even if some instances run ads.

mbp, (edited )
@mbp@lemmy.sdf.org avatar

I find it’s going to need to get even more convenient for the general public to be interested in it. Federation almost needs to be a ‘background’ process that the end user doesn’t really need to deal with. Otherwise, it’ll be a little too complicated or obscure to comprehend for most. I know it isn’t rocket science but we’re talking about the general public, here.

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

the biggest hurdle ive seen is the lack of federated sso/id. users expect the remote sites to know who they are, and then lose the process where they need to open that thread in their local instance.

DisOne,

I’m a new user, so hope you don’t mind answering a question - tried looking this up but no joy: I understand the broad concept of federated sso/id, but what do you mean by opening threads in the local instance?

originalucifer,
@originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com avatar

a user gets sent a link to a thread in some remote fediverse site.. which the browser dutifully opens. but then the user cant comment, because they are not logged in. user is confused. it is a common user story.

for some people this is obvious, for others its a problem. google/facebook kinda get around this kind of thing with an SSO process (login with google!)

at its root is the problem of finding remote communities for which one would want to subscribe.

what you Really do, is take the community/magazine/thread and subscribe to it over in your own instance, which will then allow you to comment in your local instance.

DisOne,

Ok thanks - wasn’t aware it was possible to read anything without logging in

kersploosh, (edited )
@kersploosh@sh.itjust.works avatar

Here’s an example. Say you want to visit the Engineering community on sh.itjust.works. The community lives at this URL:
https://sh.itjust.works/c/engineering

However, you are using an account at lemm.ee. In order to post or comment you need to access the community via lemm.ee, which means using this URL:
https://lemm.ee/c/[email protected]

Going to the first URL is accessing the community directly.
Going to the second URL is accessing the community through your local instance. lemm.ee fetches the contents of the community and saves a local copy for you (and for all the other lemm.ee users). Any posts or comments you make get synced back to the community.

Edit: If you are using Lemmy through a smartphone app then don’t worry about this distinction. The app is taking care of this for you and always accessing everything through your local instance.

DisOne,

Thanks for the extra context. Yes I’ve so far only accessed everything via smartphone app, but no doubt I’ll use my pc at some stage. Much to learn…

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