If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you’ll immediately lose huge amounts of users
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
Most people don’t want to self host.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side…
I’m not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why “cheap” is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
There will always be “First we need this, then we will start supporting it” excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new sucker enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they’ve accessed in the federation.
Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
@jerry@infosec.exchange , I’m sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don’t you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?
Do you know that the person you just responded to is one of the first subscribers of Communick?
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don’t have to be completely open registration.
You don’t need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
The Lemmy devs themselves.
because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side…
I’m not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why “cheap” is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
Put those under “self-hosting”.
There will always be “First we need this, then we will start supporting it” excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.
34 minute mark. It says in the blog post from OP.
Wrong Blender, my friend…
Because there are more of them?
Storage. In the video he says that backups alone costs $500/month.
Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
Small hobbyist instances die all the time. Just like the medium ones and the large ones.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say “Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own”? I’m not going to say zero, but I really doubt it’s going to be “more than 3”.
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new
suckerenthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I’d hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don’t see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let’s say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I’d be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
Let’s get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
@jerry@infosec.exchange , I’m sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don’t you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?