Gary Parker
Maybe unpopular opinion: this isn’t sustainable
If you’ve got so many users on your instance(s) that it’s costing you $4k pcm (and however many tens of thousands of dollars he claims to have spent so far) and you need to solicit money from your users/community, this is not “decentralised”
Dan needs to stop amassing users and focus on building the software. Let other admins carry the load of actually running the service
https://mastodon.social/@dansup/113887622931474663
Rich Felker
@ItsThatDeafGuy @WiteWulf Not at all a thing of the past. It's the thing of the future. But it's straining the AP model that doesn't properly factor identity, publication, and data hosting. We will solve this, but it's not going to happen immediately. It takes engineering work.
𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙳𝚎𝚊𝚏 𝙶𝚞𝚢
@WiteWulf been waiting for that, he's too prolific and feeling the crunch, you cannae do a photo platform, or any social platform, without constant cash injection. 'Free' social media is a thing of the past.
![Jayenkai [ J-N-K ]](https://gnusocial.jp/avatar/205933-48-20250127151001.webp){kind=small}
Jayenkai [ J-N-K ]
@WiteWulf Every link that I post, the server gets HAMMERED as every single server that's linked to the original server (eg, your followers on different instances) individually requests the same page.
I posted a link to a NoMansSky image about an hour ago, and it's had 173 requests, 5 of which are from legitimate looking users, and not just a "Mastodon Bot" in the Agent String
Rich Felker
@Jayenkai @WiteWulf 173 requests is utterly nothing unless something is horribly wrong with your software stack. A dirt cheap VPS can handle 10-100x that much per second.
Rich Felker
@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy That problem only exists because the social ecosystem is also the hosting. There's no reason that has to be. In an extreme solution you could imagine all the media being p2p shared by the folks who follow or otherwise come to interact with it.
Gary Parker
@gumnos @dalias @ItsThatDeafGuy this is partly tied to my previous post re. media rich AP protocols/services, and the increased costs in hosting them: https://cyberplace.social/@WiteWulf/113825863952056290
Again, I fear it’s unsustainable to have a free (as in beer) social ecosystem when hosting is not free
Tim Chase
@ItsThatDeafGuy 👋 notes that "free" is largely part of the past, and I think there's some truth in that:
It could mean users paya huge central host to keep it afloat as it tries to manage bajillions of users uploading umptygazillion media files, and any failure gets felt by all users.
Or it could be that more folks obtain their own domain, set up their own $5/month VPS, and run their own instances independent of the problems at the central site. Maybe they avail those services to friends/family allowing free participation for some folks.
But the AP model scales fairly nicely as the decentralization grows as @WiteWulf opens with.
Rich Felker
@WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos That's why you have to set it up so there is no path to monetize the platform & sell out.
Gary Parker
@ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos @dalias I believe (but could be very wrong) that “most” people would happily pay for good enough solutions that don’t have advertising and don’t sell your data to others. That’s how the Internet used to work.
But most successful services get bought out by bigger ones, with shareholders and growth targets. At which point covering your costs stops being the goal
Yeah, I’m cynical. Sue me, #genX 😎
𝚃𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙳𝚎𝚊𝚏 𝙶𝚞𝚢
@WiteWulf @gumnos @dalias speaking for myself here; by all means, if you produce a quality (and non-invasive, non-AI, non-bullshit), platform that ticks most of the boxes for what I'm after then, yes, I'll bite and pay for a subscription. For me Pixelfed is not there yet, it needs to also appeal to the more serious photography folk, somehow.
Rich Felker
@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy P2P is not incompatible with editing. Thinking it is is mixing up the functions of publication and hosting.
Gary Parker
@dalias @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy yeah, the way the media is distributed is something AP will need to address in the future, I think. But P2P brings its own problems, notably caching, when AP is designed to enable editing and deleting of content in a timely manner. Someone in my replies mentioned blockchain 😂
Rich Felker
@WiteWulf @gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy Getting a public IP costs about $3-5/mo from a cheap VPS provider.
Gary Parker
@gumnos @ItsThatDeafGuy @dalias yeah, me too. I have the advantage of still working at a uni with more bandwidth than it knows what to do with, and an endless supply of end of life server hardware. Hosting isn’t an issue to me.
But ISPs are progressively making it harder and harder to host stuff at home (CGNAT, particularly), despite rising link speeds.
Nowadays, you need a friendly sysadmin somewhere with spare bandwidth and rackspace, or money to pay a hosting provider
Tim Chase
Having been around the internet since pre-web days, there was very little paying others for services in the early days—the only paying involved setting up your own (obtaining your own hardware, paying for connectivity & electricity, etc), Or paying tuition to a university that gave you internet access 😉
Rich Felker
@gumnos @WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy You can mix those two and have cache on first access by local user.
Tim Chase
ActivityPub/ActivityStreams allows for instances to cache media from external instances, so depending on whether instances choose to do that (some do, some don't), you could either get media requests per-server (scales roughly with a nebulous decentralization-factor) or per-user (which can drag a machine to its knees for popular posts)
(and please no blockchain! 😂)
Rich Felker
@NaClKnight @WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos "Get everyone to pay" is a non-starter. Getting 1% of users to donate on average 100x the marginal per-user expenses is probably viable. But better is distributing load among participants so there's no need for an organization to deal with payments.
W.E.B. DaBoy! NaClKnight
@WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos @dalias Honestly disagree.
I think the amount of people who would pay directly for a service to avoid ads or improve privacy/security posture is minuscule compared to those who want to sign up and use a free service.
Orders of magnitude difference.
Joachim
@WiteWulf @onepict especially since he wants to streamline the mobile app registration process and redirect all new users to his own instance… where he’s already having moderation problems due to differing languages.
Administrator
@WiteWulf My friend, I have been here nearly from mastodon's beginnings -- the Pixelfed team has been soliciting money for its future development nearly that entire time, and it's still v0 software.
To me, Pixelfed is like the Aptera Motors (https://aptera.us/) of the software world -- soliciting money for years from people who desperately want the dream of what it represents to be true (in this case, an instagram free of Zuck control).
Rich Felker
@jtonline @WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos As far as I'm concerned, any kind of dynamic auctioned advertising ("adtech") is unacceptable regardless of whatever tracking they claim is or isn't happening. Non tracking can't be proven, the ads displayed (without human vetting) necessarily will be full of scams & harmful products, and hate-inciting propaganda can be displayed to secret audiences in ways that can't be caught to incur reputational damage.
The only remotely legitimate ads are fully static ones arranged with a human staffed advertising department responsible for reputational consequences of running garbage ads.
jtonline
@WiteWulf @ItsThatDeafGuy @gumnos @dalias a slight tangent but too many services conflate tracking with advertising. I might be happy to pay, except I don't trust them not to carry on tracking. Hopefully the fediverse is better than that though :)
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