this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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We have to solve the money problem! (blenderdumbass.org)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Time to start putting ads in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I'd rather have a... gags... Subscription.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Yup. As jerry illustrated, this shit isn't free.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that

There are a lot of people who aren't that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it's their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don't think it's appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.

https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?start=38m45s

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can't afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Jerry was in this thread, feel free to convince him rather than me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46526295/19376934

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Provided there is an "upper limit" on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn't private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.

I realize this isn't exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we're trying to "solve" the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance's server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.

This kind of distributed "load balancing" on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a "federate" form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.

Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Something similar is available for PeerTube:

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else's?

ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they're using. Oh, the humanity.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Let's get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:

  • Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
  • Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
  • Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
  • Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
  • Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)

We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago
  • Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)

This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.

It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say... Just like an email address or URL.

Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.

We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.