friendica.eskimo.com
I'm really sorry to ask but at this moment my gf and me are personally still 274 euros short for rent this month 😟 :sad_cat: It been a rough month..Mastodon 🐘
I answered here 5 days ago: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/40374812…
Which, for some reason, didn't make it to your instance? communick.news/comment/4930027
Both versions of the post also show 106 vs 105 comments, so there seems to be something here
I have always thought of hosting a fediverse instance for myself.
I already have a server for personal usage, the technical knowledge and it would stop being a burden on other people's servers.
Does anyone have experience with this. The federation system works fine with one person instance? Storage goes out to the roof?
You don't have to host your instance if that is your concern, but if you factor everything the total cost of running an instance (getting your own PC/VPS plus disks/storage for media, plus electricity if you are running at home) will be around $150/year. You can of course get together with some of your friends and split those costs.
But if all you want is to ensure that the Fediverse is healthy and that you don't need to worry about anything, there are commercial service providers who run servers only for paying customers. These are still cheap, $20-30 per year.
The thing is that I already have a server and a few Terabytes of unused storage. So that would not be an issue. As long as storage doesn't en up adding that much. I know that the fediverse protocol likes to replicate storage among all servers involved in an interaction. Though I wonder if it would be possible to safely erase old data, specially if I'm just hosting it for myself. I need to investigate on that.
But for the other costs I already have a server running 24/7 on my house and several Tb of Storage. I already pay for that regardless as I use it for other things. Though ideally I would not want to allocate more than 500Gb for a one person instance, idk how reasonable would that be.
And I also need to investigate how are the normal federation politics with one person instances. If it is like trying to host an email server would be hell as you'll get mark as spam by a lot of providers.
And now that I'm wondering things I wonder how feasible would it be to host very small instances on cheap devices like sbc or cheap mini-pc. Maybe aiming for thousands of instances with a few dozen people in each instead of a few dozen of instances with thousand of people in them.
I meant it as "So what if they ask for help? Do, or don't (donate)"
The initial post came off to me as a dig at the admin for openly asking for money.
The core argument here is should there be an expectation that donations should cover admins labor costs.
Personally, if an instance is run off of donations, then it's a nice to have. As an admin, you shouldn't have that expectation. If you no longer want to volunteer your time, then don't. Shut the instance down, find someone to help you maintain the instance, or pass the instance off to someone else.
I'm also okay with paid instances and admins trying to make a reasonable salary or even making additional profit as long as it's transparent to the users. It's their choice to charge, it's our choice to pay.
Overall, instances should be run by a group of volunteers, not a single individual. Otherwise, the long term viability of the instance is questionable.
this is how it was in the BBS days. We volunteered our time to run the boards because we enjoyed it and had the hardware. I covered the telco costs and electricity because i could, and enjoyed providing the space for my friends. When it stopped being feasible you passed the torch. There's always someone else with the interest and the desire and the means to be in charge for a while!
There were pay bbs' and i just didn't use em cuz i was already at my limit paying for two phone lines and hardware.
I don't mind pitching in now and then but I don't feel like i owe any of the admins anything beyond gratitude.
- lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/35858425…