I still feel like you are talking about one “ideal” scenario, but all your examples fall short of it. I’d really have a hard time to see anyone working on any of the projects from the FSF that is “worthy of envy”.

bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json

Seems like an optimization that is not really needed. The data format is not really the bottleneck, there are ActivityPub relays that can send messages in bulk and ActivityPub is built on LinkedData, which means that there plenty of powerful libraries in most languages that can parse and produce JSON in a way that keeps application developers with a consistent semantics. The more people try to change the data format in the sake of “efficiency”, the less portable and useful it would be.

and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?)

Yes and no. Most of the current software do authentication by using HTTP Message Signatures, so after you fetch the actor’s public key every request is authenticated by seeing an HTTP header, which makes it no different most common authentication schemes.

Yeah, I am 100% convinced that we need to rethink AP to make it less dependent on servers.

mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency.

It is not a matter of efficiency, but solely of how AP works. All it takes is someone one an server to to follow a community for that server to receive every vote/post/comment, while to get a whole conversation thread on Mastodon you’d need to be on the same server as the original poster or your server would need to have at least one person following every server involved in the conversation.

Let’s make a quick case study?

Take a look at Mastodon’s Patreon and their OpenCollective page. The largest project in the Fediverse gets 16500€/month from Patreon + $10k/year on OC, and that money is meant to support an instance with ~ 280 thousand active users (mastodon.social), another with 9.600 active users (mastodon.online) + the salary of ~5 developers. And we are not even counting the tens of moderators who are doing a lot of stressful work and have to deal with all sorts of issues that arise from being the largest instance out there.

An instance like mastodon.social should be pulling at least $1.5M/year in donations to make this work for the admins and moderators alone. Double that if we also used to fund the work of the developers. Which means that they would need an average donation of $4-$8 per user/year. Now, going by Jerry’s number where he says around 4% of his users donate, this would mean that each donor would have to contribute $100-$200 every year.

And this is for the flagship instance, which has all their “please donate” narrative (deservedly) on their favor. Imagine how much harder would it be for other instances. Do you really think that we would be getting 4% of every instance contributing $100/year, or 8% contributing $50/year, or 20% contributing $20/year?

Now, let’s compare with a different funding strategy, where we have independent service providers providing a service. Each one of them is working with different levels of investment, ROI expectations, etc. None of these instances would be getting hundreds of thousands of users (which makes operational costs per user higher), but at least their growth would only come if they have enough people willing to pay the asking price, and none of these users would be expected to pay $100-$200/year.

For example: my magical number with Communick is to get 10 thousand customers, each paying paying $29/year. That’s $290k. Minus a reasonable salary for me ($180k/year), that’s $110k. Minus my operational costs (let’s say I can make things run with $25k/year) that’s $85k. Minus my 20% pledge to the underlying Fediverse projects on the profits (20% of $85k is $17k). The remaining $68k would be used to reinvest in the business, hire people to help, etc.

Can you realistically make the case where someone with ~10k users could be getting $15k/month in donations? Not as an one-off kickstarter (like the Pixelfed devs did), but consistently enough that people can actually make long-term plans around this revenue, treat it like an actual job?

Do you think that all that is missing for the “open registration instances” (the .world servers, the infosec servers, fosstodon, hachyderm.io…) is “transparency”? All these people are already doing very good work and they are transparent about their costs. Do you think if the admins start also including other costs on the list, that the donations will keep coming forever?

This is not the flex you think it is…

These things would be good but they wouldn’t change the general incentive. There are still plenty of instances that are properly “funded” but still go under, lemm.ee being the most recent example. The problem is that these donation-funded instances are bound to hit a ceiling even when they hit their raising targets.

Mastodon instances that have good transparent reporting of their status (hachyderm, fosstodon, mastodon.social) are all receiving enough donations to support the hardware, but no one accounts for the labor of the admins and moderators and these are the real operational costs for the instances - and no one wants to pay for those.

What is a “substantial amount of people”, relatively to the total amount of people in the Fediverse that a) are already here, b) do not object to using stripe and c) still don’t donate anyway?

This is separate from the Communick Collective. The collective is just a way for people to support creators directly. My pledge of 20% is for the underlying projects. I am pledging to donate 20% of the profits to Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix Foundation, Funkwhale, GoToSocial, Pixelfed, etc.

For that to happen Communick needs first to turn a profit, though.

Things would improve by a lot in Mastodon if they implemented separate storage engines between local and remote resources. Then instance admins could have a way to host, e.g, local resources on their own infrastructure but push all remote instances to some “shared cache”, based on IPFS/torrent/TahoeLAFS.

I understand where you are coming from: search is not easy, but at the same time I think we already have solutions that are “good enough” and doesn’t require a ton of work from the developers. PostgreSQL FTS works well enough to power the search system for Lemmy and it works out-of-the-box, for example.

Is this rant Fediverse-specific?

• There is a lack of payment options. A lot of people that use the Fediverse use it because it is the only Free Software platform that there is. And those people would be the most reliant of it to keep existing. Because for them to go back to Facebook or Twitter is not even an option. Yet those same people cannot donate because donations require things that are not libre. I really hope that more options will appear to support as many donation channels as possible in as many libre projects as possible. So those people that are the most passionate about the whole thing will be able to support it too.

Realistically, how many people object to using a payment processor online on the grounds of “it’s not FOSS”?

Sorry, I don’t see how what you are talking about relates to my comment. At all.

I am not saying that people should be forced to pay, at least no that they need to pay to any specific admin. What I am saying is that we should stop to hand wave the total operational cost of an instance. Keeping the servers running, developing fixes and improvements to the software, dealing with moderation issues… these are all costs that need to be covered by someone.

Some people are willing to do all this work just to avoid “paying” someone else, but they end up paying with their own labor, their own server, their own time. If they are willing to do all of this, good for them. But for the majority of people who are simply looking for a social media alternative that is more ethical, it will be better for them (and everyone else) if they just go on to contribute with direct financial support and give a a few bucks every month.

Brutalinks does not have separate communities, so it works more like HackerNews/lobste.rs

I agree with pretty much everything you are saying, but I disagree on the solution. I think that us insisting on the donation model is putting an artificial limit on further growth. It “works” for this 1M-2M MAU, but these numbers are not enough to attract other players and who might be willing to try different approaches.

I think we need to change the general mindset that we “need” the donation model to keep the people around, and flip to a system where every user is expected to pay a little bit. And yeah, you might argue that not everyone is able to afford it, but it would easier to come with systems where not-paying is the exception instead of the rule. We can have a system where every N paying subscribers guarantee one free spot, with N=2, 3, 5, 10, up to the admin. We can have a system (like I have in Communick) where customers can buy “multiple seats” and invite whoever they want. Alternatively, we can set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.

If we all donate a little bit to the project, their budget will be larger. If their budget is larger, they can get more steady collaborators.

And even if they can’t get more people, by helping them we show we value all the work they have done already.

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.

I am not disagreeing, I just think these options are not mutually exclusive. We should try all of those that we can. And while I can not force schools and universities to implement their own Mastodon instance for their students, I can pay a little bit per month to support developers and service providers of the libre platforms out there.

I’m glad to see whales splashing about in the pond with the rest of us.

What “whale”? Communick costs less than $2.50 per month. It is less than the average donation people send around.

We ‘pay’ by adding content and being members of the community

No one can use your content to pay their bills.

We pay by expanding the network and being a negative to Reddit

The network is not expanding. It is stuck in this 1M-2M monthly active users (if you count all of the Fediverse) and Lemmy/kbin/piefed is hovering around 50-55k/MAU for two years already.

Meanwhile, Reddit’s revenue has grown 62% in 2024 (from $800M in 2023 to to $1.3B last year). Do you really think they care about losing a few thousand users who are all talk but no bite?

It was the free hosting and free viewing that made YT a juggernaut.

There were other platforms offering free video and free hosting as well. There were even p2p alternatives. Remember Joost? It’s not that people didn’t have a choice then and YouTube was better. It’s that could Google leveraged its capital to run Youtube at a loss for as long as needed until there was no competition left.