this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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That seems super expensive, and/or some bad math like 4 users on a paid server.
Edit: gets accused of gaslighting by OP... Stay classy! Still Super expensive BTW.
The math is right there at the post. 8 people working at $10000/month, for 55000 registered users.
Mind you, 10k per month per person is actually still less than the actual cost for a professional admin. You can argue whether they really need that many people, but please don't question "the math". It starts to look like gaslighting.
The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.
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.
I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.
More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.
Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.
Meta does a lot more than manage a Mastodon server. A single full-timer is likely all that is needed. Two to reduce burnout. Those costs are still high, but you shouldn't discredit the notion that eight full timers is an exaggeration. The top comments on the toot you link are the volunteers saying exactly that.
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.
18 months after the API debacle on Reddit, most of the instances are still around. If the model was not sustainable, wouldn't have all closed?
Your question is as short-sighted as "If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?"
No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.
This logic would mean all nonprofits would fail. It's flawed.
What do you mean? Even non-profits have income and pay salaries to the people working there.
Many 501c3 orgs only bring income in through donations.
So what? The donations are also supposed to pay for the salaries of the people working there!
The argument is not "no for-profit system is sustainable", but "no instance is receiving to sustain those working"
Holy crap, arguing here sometimes feel like fighting an army of strawmen... Please stop putting your own ideology and how you think things should be and let's talk about what how things really are operating.
Kettle?
When you show me one instance that is able to handle a large number of users (more than 10k) and that is financed by voluntary donations, and that the people working on it are paid appropriately to their role and time spent on it, I will gladly concede that the model works.
Until then, we have about 15 years of history since Diaspora, and every attempt at keeping a "free as in beer" community has failed, and in lots of cases spectacularly so. From admins who got doxxed by their own "community", to people outright giving up on the whole idea (like the feddit.de) to cases where they felt so pressured to keep supporting the people that led them to commit suicide.
Sorry, what?
If admins need more money, they can ask for help to their communities.
Lemmy.zip seems to be doing okay: https://lemmy.zip/post/29448608?scrollToComments=true
Lemm.ee had a question about a donation link and never answered https://lemm.ee/post/49850162?scrollToComments=true
I know a few instance admins who runs their instances on hardware they would be using anyway.
Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven't seen such request ever.
Do you realize the issue with this reasoning? Here's a hint.
You don't see admins "asking for money" to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let's normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.
My local library has been been run by volunteers for 50 years.
Of course it's not trying to take over Amazon, but that's probably not a realistic goal anyway.
Not happening. People are okay to pay a few bucks to support their admins, but expecting a full time salary isn't realistic. This is not Wikipedia, the text-based link aggregators are becoming a thing of the past. Look at the younger generations and ask them how many use Reddit. The new popular format is TikTok and shorts, that's where the userbase and money is now.
Bad analogy. A library in isolation can still exist and it does not require the network to have value to its community. An instance in isolation is useful, but the real value comes from its ability to participate in the larger network.
Libraries also are not the drivers of content generation. The motivation for an author to write a book is not "oh, I really want to get my book in the local library!". They want to reach an audience. They rely on a whole cottage industry of agents, publishers, marketing, distributors, etc. The same for Hollywood movies.
To their credit, what tech companies did was to remove a lot of these middlemen. But to their fault, the main reason they were so successful at doing this is that they managed to do that by taking their revenue from their "main business" and running these operations at a loss, forcing their competitors out of existence.
The focus was on volunteering projects lasting a long time.
Which is the wrong focus.
I can bet that there are kitchen soups that are operated for decades already, but this means shit to me and to most people who don't want to live in a world where fast food chains and ultra-processed crap is the main source of "cheap, universally available" food.
As usual, agree to disagree
"agree to disagree..." On what, exactly?
Do you think that the value of the Fediverse is the "community" in itself? Is this why you are participating here and not on Reddit? Is all your effort on the communities and in promoting Lemmy/kbin as alternatives because you are defending some ideal where social media can be run strictly by volunteers?
You want the Fediverse to replace Twiter/Reddit/Facebook, so billions of users.
I want a Reddit alternative to reach 100k monthly active users. I don't need the Fediverse to be used by everyone, I just want a place to discuss with enough people.
If you can find a way to finance the Fediverse to pay full time jobs to admins, kudos to you. I just don't think that's realistic (we touch on that on another comment thread https://feddit.org/post/6620726/4078921 )
We have that already. The Fediverse as a whole has 1M MAU. Absolutely nothing stopping you from using kbin to follow discussions via groups and/tags.
My point is: the actual number doesn't really matter. What matters for us to have this place feel "alive" is that it needs to become an actual hub for global conversations. We have achieved that for some groups (e.g, tech and urbanism) but for everything else is mostly a desert, and this is only going to change when we get rid of the current incumbents.
In the US maybe. Even in western Europe, 10k $ or € is a buttload of money per month. Something like 4x the net salary of a backend developer here in Belgium where I live.
Add taxes, employee benefits, mandatory health insurance (like in Germany), pension and so on. Employees' total cost is easily 2x their gross salary.
When I was in devops, my first year was 115k (us) so I think your spot on.