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14 million pays for a couple salaries and a few server bills. That burns away fast when users get higher and higher into the tens of millions. Being mission dr

14 million pays for a couple salaries and a few server bills. That burns away fast when users get higher and higher into the tens of millions. Being mission driven and not getting distracted is nice, but that doesn't put money in their pockets. Firefox and other products that are/were beloved by similar crowd have been asking for donations for years and it hasn't worked out. Wikipedia seems like the rare exception that pulls it off, and that's because they're aggressive with their campaigning for cash and they're basically an indispensable public service at this point.

almatabata 2y ago
The scale is also completely different. In terms of storage Wikipedia is not that big. Around 10TB for the English version. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia). That is relatively small potatoes. Hosting costs in 2022-2023 were around 3 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2023-11-20/News_and_notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...). They say no ads (https://www.thekeyword.co/news/bluesky-says-it-has-no-plans-to-introduce-ads-to-the-platform https://www.thekeyword.co/news/bluesky-says-it-has-no-plans-...). Seems like they will pivot to subscriptions (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working-on-premium-subscription https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working...). I remember reading somewhere they also wanted to add payments from user to user, so they could take a cut from that. If that is enough to cover their expenses is left to be seen.