Greetings! I joined the Fediverse near the beginning of this year. Mastodon was the first platform I joined. Since then, I have been enjoying my experience, and recently, I joined Lemmy and found myself using that site almost as much as I did with Reddit (before the mass exodus).

However, there are a few things I’m curious about, and I would like feedback from this community. Greatly appreciate your responses!

  1. What is the monetary cost associated with an individual hosting an instance? Can these costs be covered sufficiently through donations, or do the individuals have to look for other sources of funding?

  2. Has anyone thought about how we can bring more people over to the Fediverse? My friends and family are all still on the Big Tech platforms like FB and Insta, and I doubt I will be able to convince them to switch over to a Fediverse platform, especially if they themselves don’t see any of their connections using the platform too. How does the Fediverse community plan on attracting more users over?

  • originalucifer
    4•1 year ago

    im running a bare bones instance, just starting to get some users. i am using one of the higher cost providers in AWS, and my total costs are ~$1.02/day. i could probably get to about 25 users before i have to double these costs in the form of the next tier of hosting, but then i could probably scale to 250-500 users. for ~2$/day. i can imagine donations allowing me to scale to many thousands of users before the leecher/donation ratio tips.

    its not that expensive, but then, i dont have a ton of leechers either.

    attracting users? no idea. i hate social media. im here for the sysadminin’

    • ɐɥOEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      what specs are you getting for 1 buck a day?

      • originalucifer
        2•1 year ago

        for the vm, its the ec2 T3a plus associated services (4Gb ram, burst processing)

            • ɐɥOEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              are they doing anything special that justifies that price?

              • originalucifer
                1•1 year ago

                its amazon, they have an extremely mature ecosystem. so everything is stupid easy to setup and run (interoperate).

                and dashboards are sooo pretty