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)
I am sorry for being poor
E: I have donated 2 euro
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.
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.
the ai thing doesnt work for me since the update. Help?
Is the situation changing for you since the post?
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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!
Done.
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.
What CMS do you use for the blog page?
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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
If I wasn’t trying to save every dollar I had to afford food, I’d shoot it all your way. Especially with all the posting I’ve done here and hosting I’ve taken up. Might not be able to do anything myself but I’ve got some friends who probably can and who might owe me a favor. Sandblasting this across my friendslist.
I get the feeling.
I put in 10€ for you, now you don’t have to feel bad :)
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I’m trying to understand who (and where) to donate to here.
The blog post talks about various costs for the Worlds communities - the highest of which is server costs, and one line item is for “Monthly contribution to the FHF”. Then below, the donation links say “As a reminder, you can donate to FHF here”. So are those links for donating only to FHF? The Patreon link goes to “Mastodon.world (Fedihosting Foundation)”.
Some clarity here would be helpful so it’s easy for folks to understand who needs donations and where they can help with that.
The FHF is the foundation owning all instances (https://fedihosting.foundation/hosted/). So the costs are for running all the .world instances. The contribution to FHF is the costs for running the non-profit foundation itself.
The Patreon was setup when mastodon.world was the only instance… haven’t renamed it yet.
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.
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?
what would that have to do with this?
Would it not reduce the storage needed, and so too hosting costs? Granted I don’t know well how that works, but it was just an idea.
you could save some storage with this, but i don’t think it’s a good idea. a lot of people expect the threadiverse to have a lot more permanence than e.g. mastodon, similar to reddit. being able to find old posts/comments about a certain topic is one of the things that made reddit as useful as it used to be, especially when searching for tech related issues in my experience. old doesn’t necessarily mean obsolete, and whether this would be suitable would be highly dependent on the community. most communities are not intended to be for ephemeral content only.
Hmm, fair point. How about making it an option for communities? That they can enable/disable this permanency, with the default for new instances being ‘off’?
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
