Item — HN Reader

> There’s also the financial side. I’m very grateful to everyone who donated, but donations haven’t covered costs for a long time. I’ve had to shoulder most of the expenses, time, and responsibility myself.

One of the main issues of running a federated Mastodon instance with little to no money and donations will not cut it.

4 comments

I picked the only instance I know that actually charges its users an insignificant amount ($20/year), thinking it'd give me some sense of security that it won't just go away one day. I've been paying for it for 3 years in a row without a second thought about it.

Anyways, on Aug 1st their pricing is increasing to $50/year (150% increase!) and now I'm far less convinced that the value it offers is worth the money.

$20/year being considered an insignificant cost for a social media account just shows how inefficient Mastodon is. That's already mode than half the cost of a cheap VPS that should be enough to host a couple of users.

This is why I host a personal instance. The overheard for moderation and costs is much lower. It also means if I tire of this, migrating my content is easier.

this is why nostr beats mastodon. when the operator pitches a fit and shuts down, your community survives.

Nostr is just Mastodon or IRC with automatic multiposting.

Users must selfhost data for decentralized socials to work. One big problem with running a Twitter-like social media, Twitter itself included, is that hosting UGC is just risk without rewards. Users don't pay for the bandwidth, advertisers don't like competing quality UGC(they're possibly even angry about social media that it keeps undermining their "creatives" investment), just no one pays for it.

So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost. "First, connect to your spare Pi with a global IPv4 address" is out of question. Multihop P2P likely won't work either.

"So, a Mastodon alternative has to be selfhosted by default, and infinitely easy to set up for selfhost."

You might be interested in Holos: "Holos turns your phone or computer into a full ActivityPub server. No big-tech hosting, no middleman reading your posts. A relay keeps your identity online 24/7 while your device stays in your pocket."

https://holos.social/

That's close to what I had in mind, but relay architecture is not enough; people will "abuse" the relays, and relay server operators will find it uncomfortable. Relays shouldn't be hosting content at all.

The author doesn't sound like they are pitching a fit to me.

maybe i read more into it. i got put off by his refusal to hand it off. he can quit, no qualms there. but not handing it over? that seems petty, imo.

I personally would never give a mastodon community to a random individual if I had to step away. This is problematic on a privacy and operation level, not to mention the time it would take to interview people. Which means that if I didn't already have a second-in-command, the community would be shut down.

If it were a forum, then asking long-term contributors and moderators if they're interested in taking over is certainly an option. But it's not, there's likely no natural "hierarchy" that develops on a mastodon instance.

They could conceivably ask another established instance if they'd like to take over the old domain, though.

When mastodon.technology shut down, the operator commented on this, see "Why Not Transfer to a New Admin?" here -- https://ashfurrow.com/blog/mastodon-technology-shutdown/

The tech is nice but sadly there's still not that many interesting accounts or content there unless you really want to read about Nostr and zaps all day.

I've tried many times, there's decent apps too these days (Primal) but unless you are heavily into that topic or crypto it's not very interesting.

I feel like if you can ignore the bitcoin-bros, Nostr is a better, more lightweight design that doesn't suffer from centralized (localized) shutdowns.

he's taking his ball and going home, the financial aspect isn't load bearing (god damn claude ruined this) in his decision, it's a rationalization. if it were significant, he wouldn't refuse to hand it over to someone who still wants to do it.

A social media site isn't like a free software project. People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity. (It's more like a SaaS business, in that way.) Some instances have managed it, but only to trusted community members, and never (to my knowledge) without some degree of strife.

> People are trusting you in a way that you cannot just hand over to another entity.

Same goes for a free software project actually.