this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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@rglullis @blenderdumbass I have donations from members that cover the costs.
Thank you for chiming in, Jerry!
Great interview, I only watched a part of it, but it was very interesting and refreshing to see your perspective on things. Thank you!
Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That's better than most, I suppose.
Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn't you consider then switching to a different model?
@rglullis I think the donation model is working ok at this scale, but I don’t believe it will scale up to the hypothetical future we were discussing on the show where the fediverse became the social media platform for the masses. There are somewhere around 1 to 2 million active fediverse users, depending on how you count. If that were 100x or 1000x larger, we would simply crumble - I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage that we end up paying for across various instance) and generally, people who use social media are far less concerned with the core value propositions of the fediverse, like privacy and whatnot. I know that’s hard to accept, but we’re here because that’s how we think. So no, I don’t think we will have a future where a 500,000,000 active user fediverse can be operated off of donations from members. I also very much doubt that people would pay a fee to be here when corporate social media alternatives are “free” to them
I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It "works" for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.
I think we need to change the general mindset that we "need" the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy "multiple seats" and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
You are misunderstanding the main idea behind the whole system. It is fork-able. So people can always change things they personally find they don't like about it. You can not have anything where everybody has to do. Because those who don't agree have all the technological and legal right to ignore you and do what they want instead. And this is the point with libre platforms ( or libre software in general ).
Whatever solution we find needs to take this fundamental thing into consideration.
Sorry, I don't see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.
I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues... these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.
Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid "paying" someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.
We need to make it easy to check the financial health of an instance. And things like costs and money made from donations should be visible, and rendered as progress bars or charts. So people would know when and to whom to donate.
These things would be good but they wouldn't change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly "funded" but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.
Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.
These need to be part of the report. We have to fund not just hardware, but good life ( worthy of envy ) of those people. If their lives aren't worthy of envy now, the fediverse isn't healthy and we need to donate more.
Let's make a quick case study?
Take a look at Mastodon's Patreon and their OpenCollective page. The largest project in the Fediverse gets 16500€/month from Patreon + $10k/year on OC, and that money is meant to support an instance with ~ 280 thousand active users (mastodon.social), another with 9.600 active users (mastodon.online) + the salary of ~5 developers. And we are not even counting the tens of moderators who are doing a lot of stressful work and have to deal with all sorts of issues that arise from being the largest instance out there.
An instance like mastodon.social should be pulling at least $1.5M/year in donations to make this work for the admins and moderators alone. Double that if we also used to fund the work of the developers. Which means that they would need an average donation of $4-$8 per user/year. Now, going by Jerry's number where he says around 4% of his users donate, this would mean that each donor would have to contribute $100-$200 every year.
And this is for the flagship instance, which has all their "please donate" narrative (deservedly) on their favor. Imagine how much harder would it be for other instances. Do you really think that we would be getting 4% of every instance contributing $100/year, or 8% contributing $50/year, or 20% contributing $20/year?
Now, let's compare with a different funding strategy, where we have independent service providers providing a service. Each one of them is working with different levels of investment, ROI expectations, etc. None of these instances would be getting hundreds of thousands of users (which makes operational costs per user higher), but at least their growth would only come if they have enough people willing to pay the asking price, and none of these users would be expected to pay $100-$200/year.
For example: my magical number with Communick is to get 10 thousand customers, each paying paying $29/year. That's $290k. Minus a reasonable salary for me ($180k/year), that's $110k. Minus my operational costs (let's say I can make things run with $25k/year) that's $85k. Minus my 20% pledge to the underlying Fediverse projects on the profits (20% of $85k is $17k). The remaining $68k would be used to reinvest in the business, hire people to help, etc.
Can you realistically make the case where someone with ~10k users could be getting $15k/month in donations? Not as an one-off kickstarter (like the Pixelfed devs did), but consistently enough that people can actually make long-term plans around this revenue, treat it like an actual job?
Do you think that all that is missing for the "open registration instances" (the .world servers, the infosec servers, fosstodon, hachyderm.io...) is "transparency"? All these people are already doing very good work and they are transparent about their costs. Do you think if the admins start also including other costs on the list, that the donations will keep coming forever?
I think that we need to have a panic making notification when some instance is below a comfortable ( of it's operator ) level of money. So that people could direct their money into stopping the panic. Basically I want automatic sense of urgency when and where it's needed. FSF does it well. When they are low on money they just make a progress bar on every page they operate, with a link to a donation page. It works amazingly for them, because it immediately creates a sort of soft panic about the health of the FSF.
I still feel like you are talking about one "ideal" scenario, but all your examples fall short of it. I'd really have a hard time to see anyone working on any of the projects from the FSF that is "worthy of envy".
That is because the problem is not solved yet. Again "We have to solve the money problem!"
That means it is nowhere near being solved. It will be solved when FSF staff ( from donations ) will have a life worthy of envy. And any fediverse admin too. And any libre software developer too.
Right, so the problem is not solved and you are talking about "solutions" that have been tried before and do not work.
You know that quote about "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"? This is what is happening here.
Expecting to fund commons infrastructure through donation do not work in the long run. It's that simple. You can try to come up with all sorts of flashy gimmicks to make the issue more visible,.but the issue will continue to exist.
If there is a new gimmick there is, by definition, a change of some kind. Which means maybe all we need to do is tweak a few very easy to tweak parameters and that will unclog the flow of money. I don't know if that is what going to help. But not just try and see what happens?
That's my hunch too, although haven't studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?
Storage Duplication is I think not necessarily an issue of ActivityPub, it's an issue of implementation of it. Because all posts can technically live on their respective servers. And rendered directly or almost directly. Like it can be copied over for the time it is relevant, and then discarded to be available only from the original server.
That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for 'heavier' images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn't propagate 'likes' so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem 'empty'). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of 'node' instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?
It is not a matter of efficiency, but solely of how AP works. All it takes is someone one an server to to follow a community for that server to receive every vote/post/comment, while to get a whole conversation thread on Mastodon you'd need to be on the same server as the original poster or your server would need to have at least one person following every server involved in the conversation.
Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn't have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven't used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).
Yeah, I am 100% convinced that we need to rethink AP to make it less dependent on servers.
I agree with most of what you say. I'm a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some 'trunk' server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many 'activity' messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).
Seems like an optimization that is not really needed. The data format is not really the bottleneck, there are ActivityPub relays that can send messages in bulk and ActivityPub is built on LinkedData, which means that there plenty of powerful libraries in most languages that can parse and produce JSON in a way that keeps application developers with a consistent semantics. The more people try to change the data format in the sake of "efficiency", the less portable and useful it would be.
Yes and no. Most of the current software do authentication by using HTTP Message Signatures, so after you fetch the actor's public key every request is authenticated by seeing an HTTP header, which makes it no different most common authentication schemes.
I suppose this community is as good as any. But it's difficult to talk in general about this as each fediverse app has different performance needs/characteristics, so I'm not sure if you can extrapolate anything in general. But perhaps?
Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it's good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer 'hot', and folded away ... Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.
Well, that's the nature of link aggregators. Lemmy's and Reddit's style is a link aggregator, not really what you would consider an old-fashioned forums. It's a different sort of use case with different pros and cons. A con is that you don't get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. A pro is that... you don't get these super long lived threads cause they disappear in the stream of new threads. :P
Thank you!
Why shouldn't the donation model keep working? Wikipedia works on donations, why can't the fediverse?
Wikipedia had big donors who can donate hundred thousands of dollars and even millions
I think "hundreds of thousands and even millions" is a bit of a stretch. Wikimedia's annual report mentions donors at a level of "$50,000+", and I'm guessing most of those are probably closer to 50,000 than to 100,000. Tbf I suppose that's over just one year, so perhaps your statement isn't entirely inaccurate.