How much money do you donate to your ad-free lemmy instance? Or the rest of the free services you’re using?
For the vast majority of people, that number is $0.
Are you willing to bet the stability of an entire language's dependency ecosystem on that? Just so that we can write "crates.io" instead of "crates.rust-lang.org"?
That's really the question. I do agree that there's almost no chance it goes away as too many places and too much money depends on it.
I doubt they will too, but it's still dumb that an entire package ecosystem now has to hope that ICANN will make another exception and special case .io
ICANN tried to phase out .su, the only reason they didn't was because Russia was big enough to tell them no.
Forgot to mention .sh, which is also a ccTLD for a tiny island nation, and also shouldn't be used for hosting anything that is difficult to move.
On the feature side, according to Mastodons recent 4.3 release post development is only 4 full time employees and a budget of under $500k annually. That is basically nothing in the realm of social media companies.
Improving Mastodons features requires money and resources, but Mastodons users are unwilling to pay for instances and unwillingly to fund development. Hell, the .world folks host a bunch of instances for collectively hundreds of thousands of users and they take in about $1k a month in donations. I’m surprised that even covers hosting costs.
So…it’s no wonder that it isn’t going to be as polished as other social media in ways that would reduce the attrition.
PieFed has implemented Topics, which are groups of communities maintained by the instance admin. I think they plan to make topics per user at some point.
It’s definitely instance dependent. I run the servers for my instance at the closest Hetzner data center to myself (west coast USA) for latency reduction and over-size/engineer it for better perf.
My instance is open for registration too, if anybody reading here would find that useful.
That’s somewhat similar to the plot of the movie Plan 75.
“In a dystopian alternate reality, the Japanese government creates a program called "Plan 75" that offers free euthanasia services to all Japanese citizens 75 and older in order to deal with its rapidly aging population.”
You realize Nikocado has over 4 million subscribers, plus another million on his second channel? It’s not like there’s just a small handful of people who engage with this person.
The best we can do with current tools is just trying to tie multiple platforms/views together I think. Programming.dev runs a bunch of different services under the same umbrella like that, and I’ve setup something similar on bestiver.se / xxxiver.se
I think having communities that consist of a group of fediverse services like that are probably the way forward in the short term. I kinda want to package that up as a ‘Verse as a Service sort of thing, but I’m still not sure if anybody will be willing to pay for it.
Looking at just the hosting costs is actually a really bad indicator of total costs. The unpaid volunteer time just to run/manage the instance are likely going to be significantly more than the hosting costs if they were compensated even at minimum wage.
Each of the stacks for XXXiver.se and Bestiver.se (Mastodon + Lemmy + Static Site (+ Linkstack/Wiki for XXXiver.se premium)) are shoved into a Hetzner server at ~$13/month, and backed by R2 Object storage.
My current total hosting costs are ~$30/month to host 2xMastodon, 2xLemmy, 2xStatic Site, 1xLinkstack and 1xWiki. This is basically the minimum cost for me to host all of that on their own infra. I have approximately 0 users other than myself yet, so there's not really a useful cost/user and I can't really provide info on scaling.
Unlike most others here I'm seeing if I can make hosting into more of a job by selling the full suite of services to communities (e.g. get your own Mastodon + Lemmy + others) or by up-selling to premium accounts. I highly doubt that it will actually make any useful amount of money but I'm curious enough to try.
This was a potential explanation as to why Bezos did that https://lemmy.haley.io/post/1058450