Some Questions about the Fediverse

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨heygooberman@lemmy.today⁩ to ⁨fediverse@lemmy.world⁩

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!

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?
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?

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mbp@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
I find it’s going to need to get even more coonvenient 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 rocet science but we’re talking about the general public, here.

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- originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - DisOne@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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?
    
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Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Admin of a tiny instance with some “big” 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

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- heygooberman@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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?
  
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  - Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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sj_zero ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Cost of hosting an instance is highly variable based on the way it's hosted, the size of the instance, and what sort of instance it is (since there's many different kinds such as mastodon, peertube, Lemmy, etc)

Self hosting from home can cost just the price of hardware and power. Once you outsource hosting as many large instances do the price starts to rise. It's the large instances that start asking for donations as well, since it does cost more and more.

The fediverse vs. Big tech is the tortoise and the hare. It keeps slowly growing and as big tech takes a nap under a tree and pisses more people off by making more bad decisions. There's nothing fundamentally impossible about the concept -- email is federated and most boomers are just fine with email.
- heygooberman@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  That’s an interesting analogy!
  
  It would appear that the overall nature of the Fediverse is to have numerous small instances that can communicate with each other, and since instance size is a factor in determining the cost of hosting, many people could host without seeing a huge chunk of their income being taken away for hosting.
  
  Of course, I would imagine other factors that would determine whether someone should host or not, like having the technical competence necessary to troubleshoot server issues.
  
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originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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- Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  what specs are you getting for 1 buck a day?
  
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  - originalucifer@moist.catsweat.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    for the vm, its the ec2 T3a plus associated services (4Gb ram, burst processing)
    
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- elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  Why call your users leechers?
  
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ElectroVagrant@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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 drive to popularize them. 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 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.

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kersploosh@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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.

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Ludrol@szmer.info ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
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)
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simple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

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.

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- heygooberman@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - simple@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    
    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.
    
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