I've found myself in an argument with some people on Lemmy last week who were genuinely trying to make the case that contributing $1-2 dollars per year should be more than enough to make an open social web sustainable.
It started on a thread asking how much it costs to run an instance per user. Because most admins runs things as a hobby, all answers were like "oh, my instance has a few hundred users and I run it on $20/month VPS, so it's just a few cents per user per month"
No one even considered factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing. The only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
For completely unknown reasons, there is a big overlap between the people that make this type of argument and the people that are mystified about the fact so many smart people end up using their talents to optimize the amount of ads being pushed to people online.
This just came up a couple days ago with a thread about a programming education app with 2MM users that was shutting down, with the thread dominated by discussion of their hosting costs and how they could have cut it in half by moving off AWS; if they had managed to get those costs down to zero they still couldn't have afforded a single software developer, probably not even in Tulsa or Little Rock.
Everyone here has hosted something and has a take on how to golf those costs, but comparatively few have ever made payroll. So that's the discussion we get.
This is similar to people who discuss how little it costs to make a drug pill instead of the costs to bring it to market. Like this pill takes 3 cents raw ingredients in it.
OT: Don't get me on my diatribe about reducing drug costs by ending direct to consumer advertising.
Most pharm a companies spend more on marketing than research. If I were king for a day, I would ban direct to consumer marketing like it was banned before Ronald Reagan. Pharma companies could preserve their profit margins and reduce drug prices if none were allowed to market. If one doesn't market and all the others do, they'll lose market share.
They'd still spend more on marketing than research; it just wouldn't be direct to consumer. The real solution there may be more government funded research.
The research is largely already government-funded (US tax dollars funded or provided funding to every new pharmaceutical approved between 2010-2019, for example), it's just the patents and marketing and pricing and the profits that are private.
> No one even considering factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing, the only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
This is why I make it a point to pay for software that I find useful/enjoyable.
One of the most obnoxious side-effects of the VC startup mill's use of "free" services to fuel growth (loss leaders) is that they tricked people into thinking that software was cheap or free to produce.
Now people feel entitled to your efforts for as little as possible and, in some cases, get absolutely indignant that you'd ever try to run a real business and profit from your efforts.
For that reason it's why I try to keep all stacks as ruthlessly simple as possible, because the complexity will come from the market and flexibility will be invaluable then.
Premature over-engineering, or optimization costs a lot more developers, administration and hardware.
At times it reminds me of when someone is using AI to do sometimes a SQL query might be able to.
So much effort avoiding SQL, to the point of using non-relational databases... only to relate them.
This is a common argument, especially with tech products. The most recurring one that I hear is that “phone X can be made with Y hundreds of dollars in china”. Like, have you ever considered the amount of software and hardware development/research that’s needed to turn that thing on?
Yeah, I think it’s probably wrong to focus on the hosting costs instead of development costs. But I think it’s also the case that companies like meta or pre-Elon Twitter had more developers than necessary for the ‘core’ of the site – lots of the work is downstream of selling ads, like collecting lots of data and developing targeting systems and developing the site where advertisers can buy ad space and analyze their results. There’s some middle ground where you don’t need as many developers-per-user-observed-functionality as an ad-supported site, though I suspect it still dominates hosting costs.
Absolutely, no one would argue that the only way to be profitable without ads is by charging $8/month like Twitter or the €11.99/month that Zuckerberg wants in the EU. This might be true for closed companies who need to deal with all their overhead, but (e.g) Lemmy has the equivalent of 3.5 FTE and said that €15k/month would be enough for all of them to continue working on it. Even with this ridiculously low threshold, they are still not able to hit the target.
Now, imagine if these sites worked in a system where everyone would have to pay a little bit (or have someone else paying for them) so that every user is contributing to development/hosting/etc. Get people paying $9/year ($0.75/month) and I can bet you that you'd be a lot more than 3.5 FTE, we would be getting a viable alternative to Reddit and without all the enshittification and Surveillance Capitalism associated with Big Tech.
It started on a thread asking how much it costs to run an instance per user. Because most admins runs things as a hobby, all answers were like "oh, my instance has a few hundred users and I run it on $20/month VPS, so it's just a few cents per user per month"
No one even considered factoring the cost of the developers, the hours put in by admin, the value of the work done by moderators. Nothing. The only thing that has an actual price is the stupid VPS, so this is all that they think should be chipping in for.
For completely unknown reasons, there is a big overlap between the people that make this type of argument and the people that are mystified about the fact so many smart people end up using their talents to optimize the amount of ads being pushed to people online.