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Comment by NoraCodes | Hacker News Reader

> Even decentralized architectures like Mastodon need that - and very few people actually want to pay for it.

Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.

The problem is when people want to make a profit on their internet community. Then, no amount of community support is enough, because nobody wants to donate to your investors.

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>Every Fediverse instance I've used - and I've used quite a few - has been either so small that the total cost is a few dollars a month, or fiscally sustained by donations from users.

And that is somehow invalidating what I have said? Sure, if you have 10 users then your costs are going to be negligible and you can probably sustain it from your own pocket or donations.

But good luck running a larger/popular service like that. There are reasons why the more popular Mastodon servers had to stop accepting new users after the Twitter/Musk fiasco - it was simply not sustainable for the one-man operator crews.

Perhaps you misundstand. The ones with <10 users cost a few bucks a month. The ones with thousands of users are sustainable through donations. There is no lack of sustainability here.

Because it's a federated system, there is no need for instances larger than that (and in my opinion, they are a net negative for the network).

Seems like a failure of architecture or deployment on mastodons part. If you want your service to be both self hostable and widespread you have to make the self hosting just work.

The "fediverse" is a already absolutely overrun by bots and spam. Mastadon sites in particular. Nobody is running one of these things for longer than a few months until they just get tired of dealing with it.

The previous instance I was on was around since 2018. The one I'm on now has been around since 2019.

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