Clarifying Costs of Running the Fediverse with Jerry from Infosec.Exchange

There is a lack of payment options.

This is the most important issue for me. I am happy to send a couple of bucks to a couple of services via bank transfer. It doesn't cost anything. Paying >3% to paypal or stripe is just nuts. I won't do that.

Edit: I would send 50 cents to many projects but I'd have to pay huge fees on that, so I don't.

we had the centralised model (big corpos hosting all of the stuff) because our devices were shit and internet access was rare and precious. nowadays, with ever-present internet, when my $50 pocket computer has 8 cores and 8 GB RAM, the laptop many times that, let alone the desktop, we should be moving to Pied Piper's vision of a decentralised internet and dedicate all of our resources to that goal.

I've been a part of the fediverse some while now and I admit, I didn't understand it fully. I operated under the premise that whoever put this thing together and then spent their time and energy promoting it has thought this through and then seeing more and more people jumping on, I took it as validation of that idea.

a few years down the road, I have a better understanding, and I don't really like it. it's wasteful and disorganized and I don't see a way where some order out of this chaos emerges.

I thought it's a sort of fail-over distribution of content. so if lemmy.bing is offline/gone, you can interact with lemmy.ding or lemmy.bong and access all data and post and comment and whatnot. not so, when ding is gone, it's gone. its radiated content may be present on other instances, but still there's a ton of issues that way.

instead, I believe a decentralised and distributed system, with no single point of failure, no admins spending their hard earned cash on maintaining lemmy or mastodon instances or, god forbid, dedicated hardware in the vein of i2p or similar, should be the end goal.

Yeah, Beehaw doesn't have anywhere near that MAU, but I cannot fathom how it is costing him $5k a month to run a few instances, a few of which have many less MAU.

People see social media and other things like e-mail and video content as free services.

They just want to join and get on with their lives. Most "normies" don't really care about being served ads or being tracked. If you tell them about the surveillance industry behind the scenes they just shrug and keep scrolling their Insta feeds and clicking their youtube videos. Even people who complain about ads seem to be incapable of action if you suggest they install ad-blocker.

The people who understand or care about the problem are the ones who might donate, but not all of them. It's a subset or an subset.

As Jerry says, the donation economy would not be sustainable if the Fediverse was the size of Facebook. Unfortunately that has more to do with human psyche than actual technical merits of ActivityPub or the Fediverse.

• There is a lack of payment options. A lot of people that use the Fediverse use it because it is the only Free Software platform that there is. And those people would be the most reliant of it to keep existing. Because for them to go back to Facebook or Twitter is not even an option. Yet those same people cannot donate because donations require things that are not libre. I really hope that more options will appear to support as many donation channels as possible in as many libre projects as possible. So those people that are the most passionate about the whole thing will be able to support it too.

Realistically, how many people object to using a payment processor online on the grounds of "it's not FOSS"?

Very interesting article! I have immense respect for jerry@infosec.exchange, he was one of the first people I found on the fediverse, and it's no wonder why, he's revered quite highly by others as being a generous and kind admin.

I do want to point out one thing, and that is that Mastodon has some design decisions that make it rather resource and storage intensive.

There are oodles of lighter software out there, some with even more features than Mastodon, and some with less. For example, snac.bsd.cafe (https://snac.bsd.cafe/) runs on Snac, which is fast as hell.

I am going to guess that a not insignificant portion of Jerry's bill is caching assets. Mastodon likes to save everything it encounters, videos, images, avatars, everything... forever (though I imagine this is customisable). Most likely the assets are viewed a handful of times in one day and never seen again... but you'll pay to store it forever!

Jerry is a blessing

Thank you @jerry@infosec.exchange

You gotta love the transparency.

Did they share any receipts or official documents to back up their claims?

They have a really good racket going on and want to make sure people keep giving them way more money than is necessary. It's simply not true that Infosec.Exchange requires $5000/month to operate unless they're doing something very wrong or just straight up lying.

Money brings out the worst in people. Don't let the useful idiots bring you down because there are more of them.

Just to add thing, I personnaly don't donate regurlarly because I am hosting services from my pocket. Not of his scale for sure but still cost me an average of 30-50€ a month.
May be it is a marginal so that why they didn't think about this answer about not donating.