Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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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 guess so.
Iirc, Isn't the lemmy.world vps around €200 PM?
Thanks for the instance and good work btw, I know it's not easy running this stuff.
Yeah 180, for now it's overkill but I prefer that over scaling up every day.
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.
This sort of openness and transparency around finances and the need for donations should become the norm (however awesome it is to see from ruud).
IMO, with more transparency, the more normal it will seem to donate and the less grating it will be to ask for donations.
Don't forget to consider donating to developers of lemmy and/or your mobile app of choice!
How is it possible to donate?
Opencollective has a page. Recurring donations are usually more useful than one-time, but both are excellent.
Just reading through this it seems crazy to me that lemmy.world is being scaled vertically, is there something about how it works that prevents horizontal scaling (like, load balancing across a number of servers all using the same db)?
As far as I can tell, the software just wasn't built with that in mind, so I would expect some kind of bugs or weird behavior like race conditions, etc. Nothing is stopping anyone from trying it to see what happens though I guess.
I am trying to start a project with a fairly ambitious goal, trying to take load off the central instance to reduce hosting costs (whether that comes in the form of a single powerful server or multiples pointed at the same DB). It's still in early form, but the core (trying to make it so running a Lemmy node is not too punishing on the main instance server) is an attempt to do the engineering to help accomplish exactly this.
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Cool info. Thanks for posting that.
😍
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.
That's ridiculously expensive.
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.~~ (Edit: These numbers seem to be way off)
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? 🙂)
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Will databases grow huge on all instances if we get a hugh amount of extra users that create tons of content? I mean, if lemmy.world explodes, will all small instances need to follow?
I don’t want to know how large the database of, let’s say Reddit, actually is.
Or am I getting this fediverse thingy wrong again?
I don’t want to know how large the database of, let’s say Reddit, actually is
Too bad! There's an archive project (from r/DataHoarder) working now to grab what can be grabbed. So far its up to 3.01PB.
But that's including media, right?
I suspect so. The complete reddit archive from PushShift (text only up to March 2023) is about 2TB.
Thank goodness for people like this. I can point this out to my wife the next time she questions the new hard drives and show her how completely reasonable I am compared to some.
Also depends greatly on which software you run. I also run Akkoma, which is super lightweight. Calckey also doesn't require much. Mastodon is heavier and requires much media cache storage. Lemmy uses more images.
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Beehaw showed their finances open, it was smth like 60 bucks/month in expenses and 720 bucks or smth they got through donations last month, so it seems pretty good
I run a personal mastodon instance for myself and a few of my friends and it runs well on the free oracle cloud tier.
Using anything Oracle related is a recipe for disaster.
Oh yeah, I've already talked about it on here. They can and have straight-up terminated accounts without warning. My case was much less severe, but I will still warn away anyone thinking of deploying something meant to be dependable or semi-permanent on Oracle.
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
Does it help to encourage users to host their own media rather than upload it to a lemmy/kbin instance. Or is that a minor component of the cost?
I hope someone will give a meaningful answer, because I'm also wondering about this
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.
Fosstodon is a big Mastodon instance that published their cost breakdown see https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/
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.
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