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Donating $5/month to Kbin to keep the lights on? (media.kbin.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was trying to work out how much to donate to Kbin to keep the lights on. I read somewhere it costs something like $1/month per user?

Can we assume that 1/5 of users will be donating on a monthly basis?

So most people will be donating something like $5/month to cover the freeloaders and those that genuinely can't afford it?

Does that seem about right?

I was surprised to see that only 190 out of ~5k users have so far donated:
https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

That maths doesn't work does it?

I hope there's a recurring payment option soon like Open Collective otherwise I'll probably forget to donate next month.

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

Current cost seems to be about 67€/mo (https://kbin.social/m/kbinMeta/t/9965/kbin-Just-Reddit-Things-update#entry-comment-43440).

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

The cost last month for a few hundred users will be 67/month.

I suspect you could spend several thousand this month and still not keep up with demand.

It's a virtuous circle, the faster it is the more people come.

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

For 6k users last month it cost €16/m

For 121k users at the moment (according to the website statistics posted here) it will cost €67/m, though I think we can all agree the system is a bit under provisioned at present, despite using the largest instance provided by the VPS (edit: not entirely true, see @ajar7 's reply below).

Assuming the truth is somewhere in between (I'm assuming the current state is ~30% under provisioned), and horizontal scaling will be both necessary and somewhat less efficient (I'm assuming ~40% less efficient than vertical scaling)

It comes to something like €0.001 per month per user.

At Wikipedia they get around 40,000 gifts of on average $15. They get something like 5.1B unique visits per month. That's roughly $0.00012 per visit.

The comparison seems to imply we need to get something like 10x the user/donor engagement of Wikipedia, which is very sobering.

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

https://www.hetzner.com/de/cloud has CCX41 and higher (under Dedicated vCPU tab), but that bumps the price tag over €180/mo. One needs to file a support request to up the vCPU limits above the CCX32 plan.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Gotcha. Thanks for the additional details, that makes a ton more sense.

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

I've got no issue kicking Ernest a fiver (and in fact I did), but part of the issue is, we shouldn't be advocating for kbin.social or any of their other instances becoming the "Big Kahuna" That defeats half the purpose of being a federated protocol in the first place. Get a VPS of your own, spin up an instance, invite your friends and family, and spread the load. If you poke around, you can get a suitable VPS that can support a small number of users quite inexpensively.

I don't have mine up and running yet, but it's in the works, as soon as I muddle through how.

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

Woah, so I can host my own instance on my own server? I've been kinda looking for an excuse to get a Linux web server going...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Correct. That's sort of the whole idea behind "The Fediverse" Lots of smaller instances of a thing talking to each other, instead of one big monolithic thing.

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

It's pretty intriguing. I had no idea any of this stuff was even going on prior to the blackout.