I was figuring someone would ask about this eventually, and I'd say: yeah. I work on Wikipedia with hundreds of thousands of active editors, millions of articles, some ungodly readership, a foundation behind us, a considerable hand in every commercial LLM on Earth, and an SEO that would make The North Face say "Yeah, I'll perform meticulous, reputation-damaging sabotage for that."

Likewise, I've worked for years on PCSX2, with a team of (I haven't counted, but) 25 or so. I don't remember because I never nosed into it, but I think we make less than Fedihosting (at €1300/mo right now for Fedihosting, that's €15,600/year). Despite currently being one of the most well-regarded emulators out there, everyone knows everyone, fuck knows nobody is turning a profit compared to the timesink, everyone is in it because they want to be there and enjoy the company and the work, and 99.9% of people on fhe street will give you a quizzical look if you point to that as a hobby – born out of not even knowing what the fuck that is.

I don't know the cost breakdown of what Fedihosting spends on servers, but I do know that there's probably not a lot of that €15,600 gross per year – if any – left over for the people (at least several; never checked) doing the hours of thankless, delicate work when your whole thing is hosting multiple social media platforms. Beyond that, the Fediverse is pretty small and certainly brings minimal glory. Usually at least some people know what PCSX2 is because they've used it. On the other hand, you need to be a very specific type to know what a "Lemmy.World" is (I wish that weren't the case).