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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

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).

sneak 4y ago
$1500/mo does not even begin to cover a single 24/7 oncall devops person’s rate.
- bilbo0s 4y ago
  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.
  - capableweb 4y ago
    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.
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  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.
  - intelVISA 4y ago
    What if I'm stuck in YAML hell?!
- xani_ 4y ago
  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
rglullis 4y ago
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.
- dangus 4y ago
  Annual billing would solve for that.
  - rglullis 4y ago
    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.
gargron 4y ago
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.
- rglullis 4y ago
  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?
  - Kye 4y ago
    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 https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/970280557887270912
    - rglullis 4y ago
      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.

sneak 4y ago

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

bilbo0s 4y ago
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.
- capableweb 4y ago
  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.
marginalia_nu 4y ago
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.
- intelVISA 4y ago
  What if I'm stuck in YAML hell?!
xani_ 4y ago
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

rglullis 4y ago

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.

dangus 4y ago
Annual billing would solve for that.
- rglullis 4y ago
  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.

gargron 4y ago

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.

rglullis 4y ago
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?
- Kye 4y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/officialmcafee/status/970280557887270912
  - rglullis 4y ago
    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.