Discussion
What would it cost to run the #fediverse at scale? With billions instead of millions of users?
What does it cost to run a social network anyway? According to the annual reports of two companies that should know, the comparable seems to be about $1-$2 per user per month. And that's after stripping out a bunch of costs, like us not building ad tech in the fediverse.
Have better numbers? I'd love to see them!
From a recent talk of mine: https://spectra.video/w/k1rVULikPRfavCZ3WhXMgg
Is the road from #enshittification to sustainable #socialnetworks paved with 1.5$/month we all pay to our mastodon hosts?
@pluralistic , what do you think?
Mastodon is incredibly wasteful wrt computing resources, but not more so than servers 15 years ago - and it cost about $1/active user/month then to run a much more complicated product.
And there was this a while ago:
https://mas.to/@osma/111160850305698330
@j12t
I can't speak for Jerry's costs, but he did explain what it included. But as you surely know, volunteer hours aren't accounted for at market rates because they don't actually incur costs.
@j12t
To make it comparable, I'm attempting to account for volunteer hours at market rates. That would also help us understand what resources we need if we attempted to grow the network by some order(s) of magnitude, as presumably offered volunteer hours will not grow at the same rate.
I think that would depend significantly on approach taken. Sure, if you attempted to do it from a commercial foundation, you'd likely have to pay to employ moderation. Not a given that'd be the case for eg many co-op model services.
@j12t
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