The latest blog post about our .world and the Fedihosting Foundation. As you can read in the blog, the donations are no longer covering our running costs. If you are able to spare a few Euro’s or dollars or whatever currency, please check the list of our donation platforms in the blog.
Edit: I will add these to the blog: https://bunq.me/fhf (for EU bank transfers) https://github.com/sponsors/Fedihosting-Foundation (Github Sponsor)
Unfortunately I just had emergency gallbladder surgery after spending my entire summer out of work and thinking I was dying. I have nothing to give right now.
I’ve setup a monthly contribution on GH. Only 10AUD/month sorry but it is sustainable for me.
I use Linux, Docker, etc, professionally all day every day and can lend at least few hours a month to technical help if you want. Also happy to moderate some communities if they are lacking (I love power trips /s). I don’t use any social media outside of Lemmy (Abandoned Reddit completely, and have no interest in Facebook, Twitter, etc).
Thanks for the hard work everyone.
Is the situation changing for you since the post?
Yes! I think we might even have 500 to 1000 EUR more than we spend this month, so we can save that for next months. A lot of these are one-time donations, so I’ll have to see how much we’ll have next month, I’ll keep you updated on the blog.
When I get paid I really want to support but I’ve been jobless for a while. I hope .world gets the resources it needs!
deleted by creator
This platform needs more political and thought diversity, as of now it’s far-left only. I will donate when rational discussion happens without promoting political violence.
Fuck off Nazi scum
No “rational” discussion can occur without kicking out fascists!
They have been responsible for 80 million deaths. Rot in hell nazis.
Fuck off Nazi scum
No “rational” discussion can occur without kicking out fascists!
They have been responsible for 80 million deaths. Rot in hell nazis.
That’s the most right wing thing I’ve read all day. Give me stuff or I’ll sit here and watch you die.
“Say what I want you to say or I’ll assassinate you in public with a .30-06 round.”
Go look up the Waffen-SS. You disgust me. That’s what the Nazis and MAGAs do.
Nobody wants to read about your fantasies.
Nobody wants leftists committing political violence, but that’s where we are in modern times. C’est la vie.
This aged so poorly and about as fast as the nazi at the end of Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade.
spoiler
Oh man, I got some bad news for you…
Aren’t we finding out that the guy comes from a gun-loving religious republican family? He seems to be a groyper? Hmmm not like magats ever cared about facts anyway
Implying Kirk’s assassin is an “extreme radical leftist” before we even know who the shooter is. No wonder you want more fellow maga morons around to feel less lonely.
Done.
I was laid off a few months ago, but once I’m up and running again, I’ll drop some coin.
In the meantime, I would love to help on a technical level. I have docker experience, but limited and would love to relearn ansible since it has been a few years. Let me know how I can help!
Such a mood I would love to contribute to projects and expand my skills and experience but I don’t know how to get on the ground level. I have docker and C experience but its been a while since I’ve applied them.
Removed by mod
I’ve started evaluate all free (as in freedom) services to match my entertainment subscriptions (I.e. netflix) and this ended up being avg 5$/mo min wage for all free services that I use which is very reasonable expense. All things don’t even add up to 100$/mo in my case and the value much outweighs that!
Bless be the foss priests 🙏
The spamming troll made me realize, we don’t have any sort of posting limits? Limiting contributions to something humanly possible, like say, one every thirty seconds, would help cut down on that stuff. Maybe could base it on IP address, so multiple accounts couldn’t be used to partially get around it?
Most people would never even realize the limit is there.
Lemmy lacks essentially all mature moderation and administration controls a forum/social media platform would need to survive the broader internet back in 2014. Nevermind 2025.
It’s quite unfortunate.
The only savings grace is how small Lemmy is, it’s exposure is incredibly narrow right now.
Fediverse software in general tends to not be that performance friendly either. Leading to extreme hosting costs to scale up to even a meager number of users.and then fans out some level of duplicate resource requirements to federated instances.
Linearly, if lemmy.world (~15k MAU) was the size of reddit (~400mill MAU, being very conservative). It would cost ~$14,000,000/m in compute. Of course, the real number would be much higher due to scale ability complexities/technology. But either way that’s a lot of $$$.
Anyways, not to be a Debby downer, it’s just hard not to feel defeated by some of these things. And the tasks to make things better are massive.
Things are always getting better of course.
I had a look around the code a while ago, and not only is it lacking in moderation and administration, it’s also very much lacking in the distributed computing department.
It’s essentially set up in a way that all instances store close to all of the data and that with more instances the traffic and compute costs also scale terribly that way.
Lemmy is pretty close to the limit of its technical capacity.
I wish they had set Lemmy up as a bunch of basically phpBB forums with federated single-sign-on and frontend that can access the backend of all the separate forums transparently. That way each instance would have to only moderate, store and serve their own content instead of multiplying all the work for each instance.
Case in point: The €1950/month that the .worlds cost is close to €1 per active user per month. That’s a crazy amount.
For a phpBB forum with ~2000 active users you’d expect to pay maybe €50 per month.
That doesn’t seem right. There are some 37,000 active Lemmy accounts within the past month.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6
It’s well-known that lemmy.world is the biggest instance (or close to it). In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Mastodon users, of which at least a good few per cent are mastodon.world users.
This would give the Fedihosting Foundation a user count on the order of 104 users. And since their hosting cards are on the order of 103 EUR, this would mean each user costs on the order of 10-1 EUR.
For comparison, Reddit reported 108 daily active users. They also reported cost of revenue at 46 million USD per quarter, meaning they spent on the order of 107 USD per month. So their cost per user is 107 USD divided by 108 users, or 10-1 USD.
This seems to show that Reddit and Lemmy cost on the same order of magnitude to operate (which, keep in mind, can still mean a 2x or 3x cost difference).
You are right, must have misclicked somewhere for the lemmy.world stats. Here are the real ones: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.world
15472 monthly active users.
But your Reddit numbers are off by quite some margin. First, you are comparing Reddit’s daily active users to lemmy.world’s monthly active users. Reddit has 10^9 monthly active users (1.21 billion, to be exact).
Also, the ~€2000 for lemmy.world are pure hosting costs (except of €153 for donations), but for Reddit you included their whole revenue. That’s not even their costs, that’s their income.
I dug through their Earnings press release, and also there they don’t specifically talk about their hosting costs. The closest I could find was “General and administrative” costs, which is what’s left over of their total costs if you don’t take “Cost of revenue”, R&D and marketing into consideration, and that’s $68.8 million per quarter (~$32 million per month), so 10^7, and that includes salaries and all sorts of other expenses down to the rent of the offices, the PCs their staff use and even the toilet paper. Hosting costs are at best a few percent of that figure, likely much less. So I’d knock that down to 10^6, likely even 10^5
That would give us $10^-4 to $10^-2 (if all administrative costs are purely hosting costs) per user. That’s about the difference between paying €2000 to host a Lemmy instance with 15k monthly active users and €50 for hosting a phpBB instance to do the same.
The 1700/mo is for all instances we host, with around 30k active users/mo. (If every active user would pay 1 euro per year, it would cover the costs) But it can’t be compared to Reddit. Reddit has employees. Employees cost more than infra. If I would pay myself and all the volunteers for the work we put in, the cost would be at least 10 times what it is now.
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s close to heroic what you are doing, I wasn’t criticising your efforts or your calculation at all. I’m quite sure you shopped around as much as possible to find the best deal for hosting.
I’m just talking about the technology behind it, and sadly when it comes to Lemmy, it’s sometimes quite painfully obvious that the whole system was built by two randos without a background in distributed computing. It’s not exactly efficient.
In a larger corporation it would count as a good prototype, then they’d scrap it and replace it with the real product. Kinda like how Reddit did it, starting out on Python (web.py was built for Reddit, IIRC), and when they gained enough users they scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using proper distributed computing technologies.
(Also not criticising the Lemmy developers, since they are two randos who put in a ton of effort to make this thing we can all use for free, and that’s pretty impressive too. But it’s just not on the same level as stuff made professionally by teams of hundreds of developers.)
The “cost of revenue” is the figure that I am using. In business, cost of revenue is defined as the costs incurred directly to deliver the product to the customer, which is basically just hosting fees.
Thus I believe 107 USD is correct.
So the difference is about one order of magnitude, which is still not insignificant.
Although, it would not surprise me if Reddit makes up most of that order of magnitude in terms of economy of scale, since at some point you would just rent some warehouses and run your own server farms, or at least negotiate better hosting rates if you’re spending millions on hosting every month.
Cost of revenue is $45.9 Million per quarter, so ~$15.3 per month. That’s even less than the administrative cost. And again, this certainly includes the salary for everyone working on running the services, including admins, content moderators, support and so on, and that’s going to be much, much less than the pure cost of hosting. (Yes, they outsource some moderation to volunteers, but certainly not all of it.)
15.3 million is the same order of magnitude as 107. I don’t see what the issue is with saying the cost of hosting is “on the order of 107” here, unless you somehow think they are spending US$5 million a year on salaries of people who are directly involved in the provision of the product to the users? That would be US$60 million a year or enough to pay 600 people a six-figure salary, which I guarantee their employees are not all so well-paid.
we do have some limits in place, but lemmy only allows rate limits per ip, and those are counted in each backend process independently. I’m currently working on implementing better rate limits in our load balancer.
due to rate limits historically not working at all or not working properly, there are still various instances without decent limits. additionally, these rare limits only apply to local users. federated activities are not limited within lemmy. we recent added some fairly high limits to our automod to catch some of these cases and it’s been working alright so far.
Wouldn’t it be an idea to enable auto-deletion of messages after a set amount of time?
Could have a truthworthiness score that can increase posting limits in the backend.
Perhaps you know, but commenting anyway for those who are new and don’t, you can visit anyone’s profile and see their modlog and a vibe check. May help inform how genuine someone may be on here.
Where or with what frontend do you see the mod log?
The default and alexandrite works
Proposal: add custom animations in posts, let people pay for it. EDIT: like, dumb silly dancing frogs flying around the screen when opening some thread
I’m not sure about silly frogs, but I think showing something like a supporter icon or something could help? I’ll try making a quick PoC.
Edit: I wrote something that takes the members of OpenCollective, gets their Fediverse username and then, displays it in the frontend
Edit 2: GitHub for HTTP server serving usernames https://github.com/QazCetelic/supporter-shoutout, patch for frontend not included
Please no… At least have a switch to turn it off or something… animations moving in and around the UI are very distracting for some neurodivergent folks, myself included.
Develop it yourself, the instance hosts are trying to pay to run the servers not edit the codebase. If anything, they’re probably looking to jump ship off the Lemmy platform over to https://piefed.world/ now that it’s up and running.
What CMS do you use for the blog page?
Set up a recurring donation. Lemmy and Mastodon are great and I want them to stick around.
Hello. Is GitHub sponsor a good way to donate? Do all funds go to Fedihosting? Other link shows currency in Euros but I am in USA and want to donate $
Thanks!
Yes GH is a good way, but I’m sure you can use $ on Patreon as well?
I was looking for a $20 tier on Patreon, but maybe I should try GitHub then.
Is there a bottom limit for bank transfer, below which they would not be profitable? Can I set up a monthly payment for, for example, 1 or even 0,25€?
No for bank transfer there’s no bottom limit
