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I wonder if we can work out their burn rate from the time between this and the next funding round. They need to get federation up ASAP to maintain credibility.
by Kye 3y ago
I wonder if we can work out their burn rate from the time between this and the next funding round. They need to get federation up ASAP to maintain credibility.
For comparison: The ActivityPub fediverse doesn't need VC because it's funded by users of each of thousands of servers. It's self-sustaining.
- Hamuko 3y agoIs it self-sustaining? mastodon.social is funded on Patreon where it makes 22,750 €/month. That's what, about 9 cents per active user on mastodon.social? And the Patreon isn't only for mastodon.social, but also for iOS/Android apps, mastodon.online (18K active users), and the Mastodon project itself.
- Kye 3y agoThat's two servers representing a fraction of the near 2 million active users, and only one of hundreds of platforms. Even limited to that, it's a nonprofit. You can go and check their financials if you want. Here's 2022 (PDF): https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%202022.pdf https://joinmastodon.org/reports/Mastodon%20Annual%20Report%... 2023 is likely on the way.
- Hamuko 3y agoThe thing about "hundreds of platforms" is that they all have to be self-sustaining. And I have trouble believing that they are vs. just being maintained for free and paid out of pocket as long as it's tenable. The number of patrons for the Mastodon Patreon has actually gone down from that 2022 report (9603 in 2022 vs. 9096 now) and the monthly Patreon revenue extrapolated to a year is 273k€, which is about 50k€ less than what the 2022 report has as (total from all sources?) donations. According to Graphtreon, paid members for the Mastodon Patreon are down 23% in a year and earnings by about 28% (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon). mstdn.social is also down by about 16% / 22% in the last year (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mstdn https://graphtreon.com/creator/mstdn). Mastodon.world seems to be doing better since all of their numbers are up compared to a year ago, although on a six-month window they are dropping 19% / 25% (https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodonworld https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodonworld).
- solarpunk 3y agoi would assume smaller AP servers will be straining to federate with services such as Threads soon here...
- snorremd 3y agoAP server admins will likely de-federate the largest ActivityPub servers, like Threads and possibly Mastodon.Social if they start generating a lot of inbound traffic on their instances. I predict the AP network will split into the network run by commercial/big entities and the network run by small hobbyists/idealists. Running an AP server that scales to the traffic generated by Threads will be no easy job and not cheap. Running a Personal Data Service (PDS) on the ATProto network should be much more doable for hobbyists. The relay and app view servers handle search, discovery, and caching to alleviate traffic. So a typical PDS should not see too much traffic. Now just waiting for the Bluesky ATProto network to actually go federated, but I don't think we are too far off from that happening as they've already federated their own PDS into multiple PDSs.
- solarpunk 3y agodamn, i kinda had the exact same gut feeling about AP servers balkanizing like that... bums me out because that reduces the utility from SMTP levels of adoption to that of exclusively hobbyist webrings.
- BryantD 3y agoFederation is up and running on the sandbox network: https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds The Q1 timeline for public federation seems plausible.
- Kye 3y agoAP had most of a decade to reach this point. How fast will new servers need to spring up + how fast will people need to move off the main one to avoid losing more control to VCs? Keeping in mind it's further complicated by BGSes and the likely multiple base cost to run vs an average PDS. Someone has to run those to maintain the key benefit over AP unless they came up with an accessible to normal people way for people to self-manage keys and data since the last time I looked into it.