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I really don't get this concern. Web hosting is cheap. Like, astonishingly cheap. Mastodon instances take up a couple GB of RAM, some storage, and relatively li

I really don't get this concern. Web hosting is cheap. Like, astonishingly cheap. Mastodon instances take up a couple GB of RAM, some storage, and relatively light bandwidth. I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month. That's the sort of money people happily pour into hobbies without a second thought. Collectively my Discord server of like 30 people pay more than that on their premium offering. All it takes is one person in your community to foot a relatively trivial bill. Or, orchestrate a Patreon or similar.

numpad0 4y ago
This is something I’ve been feeling “all along”, but clearly the mental image of a typical Twitter use cases varies too much between stakeholders e.g. Mastodon backend devs, frontend Twitter app devs, casual users and heavy users. And Twitter employees, too. To an addict like I am, Twitter timeline is something measured in tweets per second. It is a constant flow, a time synchronized operation, not something that I expect to be event based. Mastodon devs and ActivityPub spec devs must have a complete opposite of that, that users only post content when there is something to say, and the post will be pushed when a post was made. The latter model is certainly doable with the ActivityPub protocol, $20/month budget, and by stretch can be handled by Mastodon as it is built. But I think there is this misunderstanding, and it just seems that none of it is built to cater for those with the former model.
cesarb 4y ago
> I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month. That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)
- OkayPhysicist 4y ago
  They've got 50,000 users. That can't be typical, right?

numpad0 4y ago

This is something I’ve been feeling “all along”, but clearly the mental image of a typical Twitter use cases varies too much between stakeholders e.g. Mastodon backend devs, frontend Twitter app devs, casual users and heavy users. And Twitter employees, too. To an addict like I am, Twitter timeline is something measured in tweets per second. It is a constant flow, a time synchronized operation, not something that I expect to be event based. Mastodon devs and ActivityPub spec devs must have a complete opposite of that, that users only post content when there is something to say, and the post will be pushed when a post was made. The latter model is certainly doable with the ActivityPub protocol, $20/month budget, and by stretch can be handled by Mastodon as it is built. But I think there is this misunderstanding, and it just seems that none of it is built to cater for those with the former model.

cesarb 4y ago

> I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month. That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)

OkayPhysicist 4y ago
They've got 50,000 users. That can't be typical, right?