rglullis

In practice, you'd need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.

So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.

I had to shorten the title, but some of the information you say is missing is actually covered on the question.

Anyway, I just thought of adding this question today because I actually was asked a variant of this in an interview (no mention about code style docs), and the interviewer was not happy with my answer which was something like "Whatever style decision is important should be covered in the style guide. If you don't have a style guide, then I'd assume that this is not really important for the team, and I rather focus my review on things that really matter. Is the code testable? Is it maintainable? Is the code being introduced completely different from what we have before or are we consistent with our inconsistencies? All in all, I'd rather spend time working on new features and shipping than arguing over style preferences."

If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.

I completely agree in principle. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority (like 98% of them) don't do that, and they just expect to keep using things for free, until whoever is backing the thing gets broke and/or burned out.

And when it happens, they just move on to the next instance. Rinse, repeat. Like locusts.

they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization,

Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.

Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it's the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.

your small-scale service

You are going at this backwards. My service is "small scale" because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing "worth to be paid for" is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.

So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don't care about it.

https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/

Great, unfortunately you are in the minority. Seems like only around 2% of the users donate to their instances, and even the ones that do are covering only the hardware costs.

Do you really think your comment is as valuable of a contribution as those made by the ones running the servers and ensuring that the place is not run over by trolls and spammers?

Are you seriously that entitled to someone else's time and work?

In any case, what number do you think is reasonable? A quick search shows that Facebook employs about 65000 people to serve 3 billion users, 46k users per employee. Even if we were to ask the hachyderm team to be as productive as one of the largest corporations in the world, we would still need at least 2 FTEs.

But given that we are asking them to be as productive as a FB employee, it should be fair to pay them as much as Facebook does, so the real cost per employee goes easily to something like $250k/year (Base salary + bonus + overhead).

So, okay, let's cut the number of people by 4 and multiply their cost by ~2. We are now talking about ~$50k/monthly cost. That's still $0.91/user/month, $5.15/active user/month.

The point is, even if "the math" is skewed to make things look "expensive", even a more conservative estimate has (a) costs per user in the same order of magnitude and (b) cost of labor absolutely dominating over cost of hardware/hosting.

That is orthogonal to the issue. Historically, only around 2% of the users donate, and the overwhelming majority thinks that donations should be only to cover the costs of hosting+hardware. What OP is showing is that the real cost that goes unpaid is the labor of the admins and moderators.

Add taxes, employee benefits, mandatory health insurance (like in Germany), pension and so on. Employees' total cost is easily 2x their gross salary.

Yes, unless you want Lemmy instances without any admins.