Esk 🐌⚡💜 (@[email protected])
hachyderm.io
@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @dma so stats, based on dec 2024 exit run rate (rounded for simplicity): #hachyderm costs about $1600/mo to run. this is up somewhat, as we've started to add some infra as part of our resilience plan announced in nov. we currently have about: - 55000 users - 9700 MAU - 3.7M toots yielding: - $.03/user/mo - $.16/active user/mo - $.0004/toot from a raw compute & storage perspective. again, this is based on 100% volunteer work. today, our mods and infra folk graciously donate their time to keep this thing going. hypothetically, if we paid them, say, $120k USD/yr (chose this to make the math cleaner), that would add $10k/person/mo to the cost. if we go with a staff of eight (mix of mod & infra), that adds $80k/mo to the run rate, for a total of $81,600/mo, yielding: - $1.48/user/mo - $8.41/active user/mo - the toot figure is silly, so i'm not calculating it again :blobfoxlaugh: orders of magnitude of difference. we could argue about the staff size - i went with roughly what we have today and assumed we made everyone full time so they could hachy for 32/hr/wk vs. calculating the number of hours we actually work. e.g. maybe we could it out at ~$4.50/user/mo, but still a multiple orders of magnitude bump from the raw infra cost.
  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
    915·
    2 days ago

    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.eeEnglish
      46·
      2 days ago

      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.newsOPEnglish
        510·
        2 days ago

        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.

        • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
          6·
          1 day ago

          Meta does a lot more than manage a Mastodon server. A single full-timer is likely all that is needed. Two to reduce burnout. Those costs are still high, but you shouldn’t discredit the notion that eight full timers is an exaggeration. The top comments on the toot you link are the volunteers saying exactly that.

          • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
            42·
            1 day ago

            In practice, you’d need some redundancy because the admins will also need time off, vacation, get sick.

            So, I am not disputing that 8 FTE is too much. What I want to make clear is this: there is not a single instance out there that is getting enough money in donations to pay even one admin, which is a clear indication that the model is not sustainable.

            • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
              3·
              1 day ago

              that the model is not sustainable.

              18 months after the API debacle on Reddit, most of the instances are still around. If the model was not sustainable, wouldn’t have all closed?

              • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
                22·
                1 day ago

                Your question is as short-sighted as “If global warming is real, then why is it snowing in Southern Europe?”

                No, a system that is not sustainable does not imply that all the ecosystem dies simultaneously. It just means that it relies on a continuous stream of idealistic people coming in, willing to help, only to collapse eventually later.

                  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
                    31·
                    10 hours ago

                    What do you mean? Even non-profits have income and pay salaries to the people working there.

                • Blaze (he/him)@feddit.orgEnglish
                  21·
                  19 hours ago

                  If admins need more money, they can ask for help to their communities.

                  Lemmy.zip seems to be doing okay: https://lemmy.zip/post/29448608?scrollToComments=true

                  Lemm.ee had a question about a donation link and never answered https://lemm.ee/post/49850162?scrollToComments=true

                  I know a few instance admins who runs their instances on hardware they would be using anyway.

                  Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven’t seen such request ever.

                  • rglullis@communick.newsOPEnglish
                    21·
                    9 hours ago

                    Again, if some server admins need help with money, they should definitely ask, but I haven’t seen such request ever.

                    Do you realize the issue with this reasoning? Here’s a hint.

                    Survivorship Bias

                    You don’t see admins “asking for money” to help because there are not that many admins that are willing to put up all the work that is required to run an instance upfront. Let’s normalize the idea that admins and moderators should get paid for their work, and you can bet that there will be a lot more people showing up.

        • splinter@lemm.eeEnglish
          15·
          2 days 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.worksEnglish
      152·
      2 days ago

      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.