patrick

How much money do you donate to your ad-free lemmy instance? Or the rest of the free services you’re using?

For the vast majority of people, that number is $0.

On the feature side, according to Mastodons recent 4.3 release post development is only 4 full time employees and a budget of under $500k annually. That is basically nothing in the realm of social media companies.

Improving Mastodons features requires money and resources, but Mastodons users are unwilling to pay for instances and unwillingly to fund development. Hell, the .world folks host a bunch of instances for collectively hundreds of thousands of users and they take in about $1k a month in donations. I’m surprised that even covers hosting costs.

So…it’s no wonder that it isn’t going to be as polished as other social media in ways that would reduce the attrition.

That’s cool. Personally I just integrated it into my normal chat client by connecting Aichat, which supports a ton of backends including Ollama and hosted options, with Matrix.

Blog post with more info https://jackson.dev/post/chaz/

PieFed has implemented Topics, which are groups of communities maintained by the instance admin. I think they plan to make topics per user at some point.

See https://piefed.social/topics

Meh, just run several associated services and keep the same username on all of them. Nothing is interoperable, stop trying to force it. And a rogue app with bad user data handling practices is still going to leak your data, even if you store your copy of the data securely.

My fediverse accounts are always “patrick@<service>.bestiver.se”. I currently am only running Mastodon/Lemmy and a few supporting services (e.g. a link manager - https://bestiver.se/@patrick), but I’m adding more as I get to them. Pixelfed, Peertube, Loops(?), Piefed…

Adopting this ActivityPods thing looks like it will require each Fediverse project to make what I’d guess are fairly significant changes to their user data handling, and none of those projects are properly funded for this. In fact what this actually seems to be doing is asking every other Fedi app to build on top of their user data API.

I applaud the attempt at building a new standard in the Fediverse, but I doubt it’s going to happen.

It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.

My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.

That is a lot of effort to go through to avoid using a VPN.

The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se

I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.

FYI, if you really think that’s enough then you should check out https://feddit.org/post/2600584

The most efficient large instances cost ~$1.40 per user per year for hosting costs, and that’s if you value the admin/mod costs at $0

Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.

Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.

My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there’s not really a useful cost/user and I can’t really provide info on scaling.

Unlike most others here I’m seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I’m curious enough to try.

Your last sentence is unclear, is that actually implemented?

I am trying the approach of just making multiple affiliated services, and forcing people to have consistent account names across each. See https://bestiver.se