On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket. Donations to the instance barely cover any of that. And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
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?
I think that we need to have a panic making notification when some instance is below a comfortable ( of it’s operator ) level of money. So that people could direct their money into stopping the panic. Basically I want automatic sense of urgency when and where it’s needed. FSF does it well. When they are low on money they just make a progress bar on every page they operate, with a link to a donation page. It works amazingly for them, because it immediately creates a sort of soft panic about the health of the FSF.
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”.
That is because the problem is not solved yet. Again “We have to solve the money problem!”
That means it is nowhere near being solved. It will be solved when FSF staff ( from donations ) will have a life worthy of envy. And any fediverse admin too. And any libre software developer too.
Right, so the problem is not solved and you are talking about “solutions” that have been tried before and do not work.
You know that quote about “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”? This is what is happening here.
Expecting to fund commons infrastructure through donation do not work in the long run. It’s that simple. You can try to come up with all sorts of flashy gimmicks to make the issue more visible,.but the issue will continue to exist.
If there is a new gimmick there is, by definition, a change of some kind. Which means maybe all we need to do is tweak a few very easy to tweak parameters and that will unclog the flow of money. I don’t know if that is what going to help. But not just try and see what happens?
I’m sorry. When I first saw your blog post I thought you were closer to what I’ve been saying for three years already , but it seems that you don’t have an actionable proposal.
Maybe I am just overly optimistic. I don’t know. But it seems like with enough gimmicky advertising tricks we could get enough people excited about giving money.
Again, I’m sorry. This is not “optimism” but baseless wishful thinking.
If you want to talk about actual strategies to get people to see the value of a free Internet and how to educate them, I’m all ears. But I’m not interested in continuing the conversation if you are just arguing what you wish would happen.