this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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Hachyderm admin: if we were to cost of the people working on this instance, it costs $1.50/user/month, $8.50/active user/month. (hachyderm.io)
submitted 16 hours ago by rglullis@communick.news to c/fediverse@lemmy.world
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[–] codexarcanum@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I donate about $7 a month to my masto instance (Hachyderm, funny enough) because:

  • Twitter wanted $10
  • I know about 1% of users donate
  • I like having an independent instance run by people I feel ideologically aligned with.

For similar reasons I will very likely donate something to db0 this quarter to support my Lemmy habit.

I still have reason to use Facebook, reddit, Instagram, and those places all suck. It's so dire scrolling there and literally 80% of the content is ads. I canceled all my streaming services this year but I'm still going to pay for independent social media because it's worth it.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 3 points 10 hours ago

Great, unfortunately you are in the minority. Seems like only around 2% of the users donate to their instances, and even the ones that do are covering only the hardware costs.

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 19 points 16 hours ago

Yeah host-ers on the fediverse are not making money that's for sure.

I self host a number of fedi systems. Mastodon used to be the most "costly" in terms of CPU and storage.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 13 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (1 children)

That seems super expensive, and/or some bad math like 4 users on a paid server.

Edit: gets accused of gaslighting by OP... Stay classy! Still Super expensive BTW.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 1 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

The math is right there at the post. 8 people working at $10000/month, for 55000 registered users.

Mind you, 10k per month per person is actually still less than the actual cost for a professional admin. You can argue whether they really need that many people, but please don't question "the math". It starts to look like gaslighting.

[–] splinter@lemm.ee 20 points 13 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (1 children)

The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

In any case, what number do you think is reasonable? A quick search shows that Facebook employs about 65000 people to serve 3 billion users, 46k users per employee. Even if we were to ask the hachyderm team to be as productive as one of the largest corporations in the world, we would still need at least 2 FTEs.

But given that we are asking them to be as productive as a FB employee, it should be fair to pay them as much as Facebook does, so the real cost per employee goes easily to something like $250k/year (Base salary + bonus + overhead).

So, okay, let's cut the number of people by 4 and multiply their cost by ~2. We are now talking about ~$50k/monthly cost. That's still $0.91/user/month, $5.15/active user/month.

The point is, even if "the math" is skewed to make things look "expensive", even a more conservative estimate has (a) costs per user in the same order of magnitude and (b) cost of labor absolutely dominating over cost of hardware/hosting.

[–] splinter@lemm.ee 10 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.

More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.

Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.

[–] przmk@sh.itjust.works 10 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

In the US maybe. Even in western Europe, 10k $ or € is a buttload of money per month. Something like 4x the net salary of a backend developer here in Belgium where I live.

[–] rglullis@communick.news 0 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Add taxes, employee benefits, mandatory health insurance (like in Germany), pension and so on. Employees' total cost is easily 2x their gross salary.

[–] mesamunefire@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

When I was in devops, my first year was 115k (us) so I think your spot on.

[–] atro_city@fedia.io 6 points 14 hours ago

9$/month to send toots? Really?

[–] ocean@lemmy.selfhostcat.com 4 points 16 hours ago

I love how the first admin that reminds immediately says talk not working 32 hours a week lol

[–] Sonor@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

Does this apply to lemmy 1/1?

[–] Blaze@feddit.org 1 points 9 hours ago (1 children)
[–] Sonor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Thank you! I think in the end it all converges on the same point: support your instances if you like them online

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, unless you want Lemmy instances without any admins.

[–] Sonor@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

Good. I feel good about donating then

[–] rglullis@communick.news 4 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

That is orthogonal to the issue. Historically, only around 2% of the users donate, and the overwhelming majority thinks that donations should be only to cover the costs of hosting+hardware. What OP is showing is that the real cost that goes unpaid is the labor of the admins and moderators.

[–] Sonor@lemmy.world 1 points 2 hours ago

Yes, and it’s a fair point as well.

[–] 1984@lemmy.today -4 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

I wish to get paid for my labor writing this comment.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Do you really think your comment is as valuable of a contribution as those made by the ones running the servers and ensuring that the place is not run over by trolls and spammers?

Are you seriously that entitled to someone else's time and work?

[–] 1984@lemmy.today 1 points 10 hours ago* (last edited 10 hours ago) (1 children)

It was an attempt at humor. :)

Ok let me say it in a better way. People who work in IT do it because they like it. Many of the first world wide web pages or YouTube videos were made without anyone wanting any money for it. There was no profit motive or expectation whatsoever.

That's why I thought it was funny to read how instance owners are doing labor without getting paid, as if that was the purpose of the instance. To get paid for running it.

To me that's funny. It's a bit like me painting a painting and putting it out there, and asking people to pay for my labor. The hours I spent making it. Because now the painting exists in the world. Who is gonna pay for it?

I believe instance admins are more than happy running the instance without profit motive. Because it's nice to be part of giving something to a community of people.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -3 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Paging @rikudou@lemmings.world so that he can see why my service offered for $29/year is actually quite a bargain.

[–] rikudou@lemmings.world 7 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Dude, just get over it. I think you're charging more than you should, I'm not gonna change my mind if you tag me.

Especially if I can see just from the scale and price that it's not cost-optimized, they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization, just throwing money at the problem is no longer there.

Comparing your small-scale service to that is dishonest.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -1 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)

they simply hit the scale where they need to get smarter about optimization,

Read again, because it seems you are refusing to understand.

Optimizing the hardware/server part is completely irrelevant. The operational costs are less than 3 cents per user, it's the labor of the people working there that is going unaccounted.

your small-scale service

You are going at this backwards. My service is "small scale" because most people are still expecting to have social media offered to them for free, or at best they think that the labor should be free and that the only thing "worth to be paid for" is the server. And because there are still so many people who are willing to run instances for fun/as a hobby, they are effectively pricing their own work at zero dollars, and then of course others will flock to those instances.

So, yes, of course we can not compare my service with the larger instances, because these instances are effectively operating at a loss and they just don't care about it.