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Esk 🐌⚡💜 (@[email protected])
hachyderm.io@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma so stats, based on dec 2024 exit run rate (rounded for simplicity):
#hachyderm costs about $1600/mo to run. this is up somewhat, as we've started to add some infra as part of our resilience plan announced in nov.
we currently have about:
- 55000 users
- 9700 MAU
- 3.7M toots
yielding:
- $.03/user/mo
- $.16/active user/mo
- $.0004/toot
from a raw compute & storage perspective.
again, this is based on 100% volunteer work. today, our mods and infra folk graciously donate their time to keep this thing going.
hypothetically, if we paid them, say, $120k USD/yr (chose this to make the math cleaner), that would add $10k/person/mo to the cost.
if we go with a staff of eight (mix of mod & infra), that adds $80k/mo to the run rate, for a total of $81,600/mo, yielding:
- $1.48/user/mo
- $8.41/active user/mo
- the toot figure is silly, so i'm not calculating it again :blobfoxlaugh:
orders of magnitude of difference.
we could argue about the staff size - i went with roughly what we have today and assumed we made everyone full time so they could hachy for 32/hr/wk vs. calculating the number of hours we actually work. e.g. maybe we could it out at ~$4.50/user/mo, but still a multiple orders of magnitude bump from the raw infra cost.
Lol, I run multiple FOSS services online, two of which have thousands of MAUs. I consider myself lucky to be even covering the hardware costs at this point. I would love to even make an extra 500 Eur per month for myself given the amount of time I spend doing sysadmin, automation, PR, development and just being an active part of the communities.
We really need to change in what people consider valuable and how little actually is needed to help. Like literally, all you need to do is spare 1$ per month on your social media that is your primary home. If every user did that, all those service providers would have so much support.
I don’t know how it could possibly be implemented, but I wish there was some kind of application or token that ran on my devices that would track how much I visited or used various pieces of FOSS software and services and then at the end of every month would pay each one from a predefined amount of money I set for how much I think I can afford for all of it. Maybe before actually sending the payments it generates a report stating the breakdown and allowing me to tweak the percentages.
Likely a privacy nightmare even if entirely locally running, but would be sweet.
I completely agree in principle. But the reality is that the overwhelming majority (like 98% of them) don’t do that, and they just expect to keep using things for free, until whoever is backing the thing gets broke and/or burned out.
And when it happens, they just move on to the next instance. Rinse, repeat. Like locusts.
The things is, there’s plenty of people who are willing to open their wallet for their services, they just prefer paying corporations, instead of donating to FOSS.