Fedigrow

By saying that you are covering the cost of the hardware, you are basically saying that the work of everyone else is worth zero. This is downright offensive.

I'm going to add to your list the time of people posting content and animating communities. I am happy to freely dedicates some of my time to it, and if someone would show up and say "community animators needs to be paid for their time", I would suggest them to go to Nostr, which seems to exactly address this issue, rather than here, where most of the people volunteer with their free time.

A comment from the Mbin lead dev yesterday (https://kbin.melroy.org/m/[email protected]/t/444176/-/comment/3956532 )

I also asked among the contributors if you should accept any form of money or NLnet funding or anything in that regard. Our common conclusion was: NO. Because we are doing it for fun, asking money will only create a situation were you might even feel more obligated.

No, not really. At the moment I am more upset about the fact that you are one of the most active users here, that you jump instances every two weeks or so and yet you seem to think that contributing $1/year is “enough” to support the work of everyone involved here.

Based on the other thread, it seems to indeed cover the costs. I usually give 5€ per year for an instance I use a lot. Still much cheaper than the 30$ for your bundle. It's a free environment, people will go to places using the donation model they prefer.

Imagine going to a farmer’s market and saying “how come do you sell those eggs for 10€ a dozen, you can feed 25 chickens for a whole month with that, if they lay 1 egg per day you are getting 750 eggs, so I don’t see why I should give more than 12/750 euros per egg.” and tell me how well that’s going to go.

Imagine opening a restaurant serving soup next to a kitchen soup where volunteers make and serve the exact same soup as yours, and tell me how that is going to work.

Second and most important: the $29/year is supposed to buy you peace of mind.

See above, peace of mind is similar on lemmy.dbzer0 for instance, and their admin still said

I would still fund this instance even out of pocket, but I really appreciate you all for assisting in this way.

https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/21873104

They provided the CSAM detection tool and Fediseer. Those project have donations tools, but I've never seen their creators threatening to stop developing if they don't get enough money the way you are.

No, I’m not. I’m saying that I can still manage it if needed. My proposal would be to donate the instances to the team to get rid of this “single point of failure” that you are holding me against.

The single point of failure still stands as of today, and on top of that, the lack of organic content and communities creation on your communities is probably why you are not having as much users as you would like to.

You are saying that my work is not worth the price that I am charging, yet at the same time you think that others will not be interested in doing because it takes time and expertise. Don’t you see the contradiction here?

It's not a contradiction. To come back to the volunteer kitchen soup above, it would be similar to donate 50 delivery trucks to a kitchen soup that does only manage one. They would need to park them, manage their insurance, broken tires, oil, etc, while they are doing fine with one truck, and that's how comfortable they are operating as volunteers.

If your idea of “growing the network” is to keep waiting to get more enthusiasts who are willing to sacrifice their time and sanity to serve 1-2 thousand users at a time, you are going to wait for a very. long. time.

LW host 18k monthly active users. Lemm.ee host 3k monthly active users. The issue is not with the number of instances, it is fine as of now, the issue is getting regular users.

If everyone keeps treating this as a mere hobby, and if users keep thinking like you and refuse to pay for the professionals what they are worth, then the professionals are simply going to go work somewhere else. If you don’t believe me, just look at what is happening with Mastodon and Bluesky.

Your perspective comes from someone who does not currently have a job and try to make the Fediverse profitable. Restaurant vs volunteer kitchen soup situation again. The vast majority of instance owners seem to indeed treat this as a hobby, hence are okay to give their time for free, and appreciate if donations cover the hosting costs.

Have a look at the other thread, there was only one other admin who shared your perspective.

I said it already, I'll repeat it: you have a much higher chance to get another source of income with another job than expecting people to pay 30$ a year for a bundle of Lemmy/Mastodon/Matrix.