I'm pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?

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[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

To me this is a very valid concern -- as I understand the rough breakdown, ~~reddit costs about $0.12 per active user per month to operate, times about 4 million active users in any given month equals a little under $500k per month in hosting costs.~~ (Edit: These numbers seem to be way off)

I think it's possible that this will be manageable within the Fediverse (i.e. not a growth-impeding-beyond-a-certain-point problem), but I do think it's likely to be a significant issue. I am actively working on a little project that I hope will be able to make it possible to run an instance with much reduced hosting costs.

(Also, I noticed that I accidentally referred to reddit in the past tense in my first paragraph which I take as a positive sign.)

(Also, I subscribed to Ruud's and Dessalines's Patreons, have you? 🙂)

[–] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

reddit costs about $0.12 per active user per month to operate, times about 4 million active users in any given month equals a little under $500k per month in hosting costs

These figures... Where did you come by them? I recognize the $0.12 estimate from Apollo's dev, Christian Selig (u/iamthatis) breaking down what he thought was /r/ income per user per month, not cost.

So at generous estimates of $600M and 430M monthly active users, that's $1.40 per user per year, or $0.12 monthly.

As other lemmy admins have mentioned, for US$0.01/month/user, all costs would be covered handily (so far at least).

Edit: added quote from Christian

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Hm... I think my numbers are wrong. My source was the following fairly unreliable numbers filtered through my imperfect memory:

Christian's post for the $0.12 per user per month, misremembering it as hosting costs
This post where one random person does some dodgy math to arrive at $5.8 million per year hosting costs, divided by 12 is $483k. This is all as of 9 years ago.
4 million users from $483k divided by 0.12

So, I think my math is wrong. As you noted, the 4 million users per month is probably too low by 1-2 orders of magnitude in the present day (although I feel like "active users per month" probably has a fairly imprecise definition). Do you happen to know what are accurate numbers? I'd be pretty interested in knowing what are the actual numbers for reddit's hosting costs / active users / cost per user, since obviously mine are wrong. 🙂

As other lemmy admins have mentioned, for US$0.01/month/user, all costs would be covered handily (so far at least).

Is this true? ~~Ruud's numbers were €532 for hosting costs in May, and 8,000 users as of mid-June after a bunch of growth -- so wouldn't that add up to around $0.10 per user? Or were there economies of scale as he moved up to his higher server tier?~~ (Edit: April and May were only Mastadon, no Lemmy. Obviously I cannot reading-comprehension today, I give up on numbers for now)

[–] s38b35M5@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Do you happen to know what are accurate numbers? I'd be pretty interested in knowing what are the actual numbers for reddit's hosting costs / active users / cost per user...

I really don't know, but I share your interest. I'm not sure if it's out there at all, since they're a private company. I think the guesses that we have mention that they're based on extrapolating data that was somewhat questionable to begin with, as it came from someone with a clear interest in showing high numbers of users and income, but with no duty to report either of those truthfully. If you read Christian's post closely, he inflates both users and income to favor /r/ and give them the benefit of the doubt.

My other mention of one penny per user came from another thread where an admin of a smaller instance was saying they received a surplus of donations, and that they told their user base that a single penny each month would suffice. I suspect lemmy.world has a higher base cost to run, as he has mentioned he has proximity to this infrastructure and the means to run there at small scale with no financial support. All that is to say that I think some instances with <10k users can run on cheaper hardware, but @ruud was able to start over provisioned and expected to see >10k users. He also shared a cpu utilization chart showing his instance never approaching even 20% load.

I'd guess that at present active users, depending on instance plans and needs, server costs can run from between 1 and 15 cents per user.