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?
Ruud who runs lemmy.world and mastodon.world publishes financial information on his blog: https://blog.mastodon.world/april-and-may-2023-financial-update
Wow, such transparency… that’s awesome. I wonder (hope) if there will be a massive spike in donations in June.
/me sets alarm to remind me to donate after work since I keep thinking about it while I’m away.
Ya, no kidding. This piqued my interest, but I did not click expecting to see an actual cost basis! I have been looking at potentially setting up my own node, but at the same time… Perhaps contributing here, financially as well, could be the best option.
Still fun to play around with my own stuff though :) Thanks guys!
I run a personal instance with only two human users and a couple of accounts each (admin and daily use). I use a DigitalOcean droplet with 2gb of memory and 80Gb of storage. With a dozen or so communities, my disk usage since July 4 is at about 12gb.
My total monthly cost with weekly backups is about $14 USD. If the storage demands keep going up, my cost will increase to about $19/month
Will databases grow huge on all instances if we get a hugh amount of extra users that create tons of content? I mean, if lemmy.world explodes, will all small instances need to follow?
I don’t want to know how large the database of, let’s say Reddit, actually is.
Or am I getting this fediverse thingy wrong again?
My personal (extremely small) instance with only a few users currently costs around $8 / month on a VPS. Still have plenty of headroom for more users as well I believe.
I see four options:
- Server owner assumes all costs of the server. Possible if instance is not huge (ideal on a federated environment) or owner has money and will to do it.
- Accept donations from users
- Require paid subscription to access (and thus becoming private otherwise anyone could still access the server from a free instance)
- Run ads on site. Same as 3, users would migrate.
So I only see 1 and 2 possible
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.
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? 🙂)
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
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)
Yeah, I have wondered also… Just like if I wanted Usenet access I would expect to pay for it… There are costs involved, so how much?
That really depends on how many users and communities you have. It can be in single digits for small servers and hundreds (or even thousands) for the bigger ones. And everything in between for medium-size servers.
I run a personal mastodon instance for myself and a few of my friends and it runs well on the free oracle cloud tier.
Using anything Oracle related is a recipe for disaster.
