On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn’t free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn’t come from advertisers, it must come from users.
There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It’s only fair.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?start=38m45s
Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can’t afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.
Jerry was in this thread, feel free to convince him rather than me: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/46526295/19376934
Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
Something similar is available for PeerTube: