this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Paging @[email protected] so that he can see why my service offered for $29/year is actually quite a bargain.
Dude, just get over it. I think you're charging more than you should, I'm not gonna change my mind if you tag me.
Especially if I can see just from the scale and price that it's not cost-optimized, they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization, just throwing money at the problem is no longer there.
Comparing your small-scale service to that is dishonest.
Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.
Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it's the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.
You are going at this backwards. My service is "small scale" because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing "worth to be paid for" is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.
So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don't care about it.
Isn't that a major point? If there are many people willing AND HAPPY to run it for free, presumably because they're getting something intangible out of it, why not leave it to them?
I'm not asking people to stop doing things for free or to have hobbies. What I am saying is, simply, if we really want to get rid of the Elon Musks and Zuckerbergs of the world, we need to get rid of corporate-controlled social media for everyone and all of this "Fediverse" thingy will need a lot more resources than a handful of people doing it "for fun" and the users will have to understand that everyone needs to support them with more than "just enough to cover hardware costs".
Also, I want to say that I really believe in the Nassim Taleb's "Skin In The Game" principle: you can only take someone's opinions seriously when they are willing to take all the risks themselves that comes with it. I solemnly ignore anyone that just complains and/or asks for systemic changes without accepting to pay the price required for those changes. This includes anyone here that keeps talking about "Evil Corporations" and promoting the Fediverse without putting their money where their mouths and paying the full sticker price.
IOW, I'm not upset at the admins that are willing to put a lot of work and time to do things for free, but I'm upset at the majority of users who think that just because someone is willing to work for free that they should not take initiative to help as much as they can. And I know that the majority of Fediverse users have the means to support the admins with more than "just enough to cover hardware costs".
Then promote Bluesky. This one could succeed.
Bluesky is only marginally better. Just like every other startup that has not achieved a dominant position, if/when they reach critical mass they will become a rent-seeking player, just like every other VC-funded company.
Their protocol is open, but not really decentralized. It is very clear that they want to become a single global indexer of the whole social web.
Bsky will probably enshittify. But if the priority is to get people off Twitter, it's the most likely successful alternative short term.
Hopefully long term Mastodon and others will find a way to solve the content discoverability issue.