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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

On the one hand, I am sad to hear about it and even more so due to the circumstances.

On the other, I feel a bit validated in my belief that we need to have professionally managed instances on the fediverse. "Community Support" only goes so far. Thousands of people using a service, but how many of them actually help with its upkeep?

I know that my instance has only a handful of paying users, and it is barely paying for itself, and far from paying all the work that I've put into it. But charging for access brings a lot of benefits: it keeps spammers and bots away, it is a good filter against trolls and best of all makes it explicit what is expected of all parties.

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Yeah, I don't see why more instances wouldn't charge for access. Could be something ridiculously cheap as well, like $1/month or something.

Mastodon.technology have ~1.5K activate users (out of ~24K users in total), charging $1/month would easily cover any cost involved with hosting the instance itself, if done right (avoiding hosting providers that charge for "premium bandwidth" and so on, looking at you AWS).

$1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.

I think capableweb's comment is an unintentionally good example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand how much it takes to run these sorts of things. The comment was in the dimension of money, but I'm sure there is a similar lack of information attending the dimensions of people and time as well.

I think bilbo0s's comment is an unintentionally good example of the fact that a lot of people don't understand how little it takes to run these sort of things if you know what you're doing.

"The cloud" has ruined people thinking that everything has to cost 10x or even 100x compared to what it would cost if you just spend some time learning about administration yourself and set up a dedicated instance instead of using anything cloud.

As an exercise, without looking it up beforehand, what kind of hardware do you think HN runs on and how much they pay for that per month?

Also, $1500/month is a proper salary in many places in the world. Not everyone lives in a metropolitan city where wages tend to be much, much higher.

To be fair, that devops person would probably not need to do anything 23 out of those 24 hours on 6 out of 7 of those days.

If you use sane software, running a server is not a lot of work.

What if I'm stuck in YAML hell?!

It wouldn't need single devops person full time job. But it would make more sense to just pay a company to manage the technical side for you

Because most people don't want to pay for something that they (think) can get for free.

The other problem is that charging $1/month is a practical pain in the ass. For micropayments, processors will easily take 20-30% of that.

Annual billing would solve for that.

Yes, but you are also asking for a bigger commitment.

One solution that I implemented in communick as an attempt to solve both cases: sell group packages. Let one person pay for a group of 5-10 people. This way you can still have a monthly subscription and you lose less money to the payment processors. I was also hoping that would help with network effects, as it would be an incentive for one person to bring others along. Alas, I think I am the only "customer" from my own service that has been using this functionality.

Saying it as the person in charge of developing Mastodon, probably the most likely reason more servers don't charge for access is that it's not built into the software, so it would require either customizing the code or manually sending out invites based on external payments (e.g. Patreon, some servers actually do that). I would imagine the other likely reason is that complexity of signing up as a business with your local tax office, charging the right taxes based on where the customers are located, and accounting. I do absolutely agree that paying for your account would make running the servers so much more sustainable.

I doubt that any SaaS pays taxes based on where the users are located, so the only burden is in setting up the business in the first place. In any case, projects like open collective could help to manage fiscal issues.

For smaller instances, I really have a hard time seeing tax authorities going after people because they decided to host a server and ask a total of $100-$1000 per year from a few dozen people.

Lastly, perhaps if you weren't so biased against crypto, you'd realize that this is one actual valid use case for it?

The US has complicated state-by-state rules for who has to pay sales taxes and when. Other places seem to mostly have something like VAT with varying rules. One benefit of Patreon is they handle all this for you.

One of McAfee's last scams before he died was pushing a "crypto-based social network" that was just a poorly reskinned Mastodon called Hiveway.[0] It was 100% BS and didn't even bother to turn off federation. Hilarity ensued. There's nothing stopping someone from legitimately adding crypto support to it.

[0] https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/970280557887270912

I am not even talking about adding crypto into the network protocol - which I agree is not needed unless you are an ideologue. What I am saying is that smaller instances (from tens to low hundreds of users) could accept crypto for payments and use that to fund its maintenance.

Yeah, you could do it with regular payment processors as well, but with crypto you could not only avoid the fees from micropayments (layer-2 solutions already exist and allow fast and cheap transfers) but most importantly you could run these instances without dealing with bureaucracy. No taxman will come after you because you are getting a few hundred bucks per month.

Well if only having your own server on Mastodon was realistic, instead its totally impossible to get discovered.

There is fix for this, which is Fedverse Relays, but guess what ? Mastodons official servers don't use them.

I need to understand this obsession with "getting discovered via the application itself".

I mean, what's the problem of using other means of communication to publish/promote your identity?

I am far from being internet famous, and I get at least one follower every week on Mastodon simply because I put it on my Twitter bio.

Then your Mastodon is totally dependent on getting discovered via twitter.

I'm sure that was just one example, not an exhaustive list of the single way people find this person on Mastodon.

That simply isn't true. I'm a nobody and plenty of folk have found me from seemingly inane posts. People have found me out of the blue, from across the Fediverse, and I have no idea why; all I do know is we now chat frequently and without either of us even looking for one another. What's impossible is to discover how to use a platform without reading the documentation, and assuming that algorithms will just do the work for us.

If you use a popular instances your account will show up in searches, likes and other things.

But when using an independent server, one would need to type your full username, and then try and see if such an account exists. if you only type the display name, or username without the server address, nothing will show up.

Which is fine for chat apps like Matrix or E-Mail, but not for platforms where discoverability is important.

You know what else helps a lot? Getting in quality conversations with others, having something relevant to share with others, etc. IOW, by being social.

At this point, it seems like a feature that the system does not make it easy to be discovered.

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