So now it’s around 1 month since we start to maintain Pawoo.net . I want to be more transparent on the cost. Screenshot is the cost of AWS + CDN for pawoo (not including mstdn.jp / mastodon.cloud which are not using aws and using diff CDN). There are lots of optimization we can do but for now the cost for all 3 instance is around 45k$ (just rough estimates). The payroll of maintainers and devs for app/backend is covered by our other businesses so not gonna calculate here. (Est 4 full time)
The status of Pawoo is very different from other instance since it’s involved with many legacy technologies and it will take longer to make all these compatible. Other instance should cost less. Also aws is not good for mid/small instance, but it’s just stable for big instances (for now it’s adding risk to migrate to others for Pawoo); in the end we hope to get rid of aws and go more decentralized.
We’re not interested in monetizing Fediverse / instances in short terms and overall decentralized social network is a very new space to explore. Our team’s been doing decentralized social networks since 2017 so almost as old as mastodon.
But in the very end whether we need commercialization is a more fundamental question. I tend to think there’re better ways of building public good/infra while not starving and take decent money. The goal is to build protocols, not platforms.
Btw recently I’m exploring (learning) many new things and old things. New things such as Nostr, lens and even look back to Email, RSS, WWW - even Xanadu :)