Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.

I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.

Thank you
Time to start putting ads in.
- Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.
- I support ads.
  Oh, calm down. I don't support the ad level of Facebook, nor the targeted ads, nor the algorithm.
  And we, as users, get to decide when too many ads are too many, with our feet.

The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I'd be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can't sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we've used for 100s of hours.

Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let's say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
- I'm already paying my instance and lemmy and kinda loyal to it. I'd alsp like to properly support the software i use before trying to support content creators. One day in the future something like communick would be appealing.
  The website says 20% of the profit is donated? Does that mean to charities?
You can actually do it using USDC (USD stablecoin) on Ethereum via Base for free:
https://www.coinbase.com/en-br/developer-platform/discover/launches/zero-fee-usdc
Most people think of crypto as a scam, but there are actual useful products being built on Ethereum, and this is a great illustration on where it is a useful tool
- I think something like this is going to be a necessity to make a federated video platform work.
  What are the transaction fees for USDC?

The only real option is to charge people.
Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.

There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.

Provided there is an "upper limit" on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn't private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn't exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we're trying to "solve" the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance's server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed "load balancing" on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a "federate" form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
- This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they've accessed in the federation.
  Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
- That's not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn't very scalable.
- I think that would just be a different instance.
- Something similar is available for PeerTube:
  Platform redundancy by P2P, and
  offload of transcoding and transcription to Remote Runners
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren't that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it's their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don't think it's appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?start=38m45s
- Then you charge by default and carve out exceptions to those who can't afford. Instead of having 2% of people donating and 98% of freeloaders, make it that every 5 paying subscribers guarantee one free spot. Alternatively, set up a Caffe sospeso system where donations are still accepted, but accounted directly for someone who wants to claim it.
  There is really no excuse to keep the donation model as a rule.

Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.

Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server. They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day. Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook. They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event. They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.

Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.

I wouldn't mind ads like these.

Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I've managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that's my guess at least.

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else's?

ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they're using. Oh, the humanity.

I am not sure if the “he” reference is me, but I did ask and people did step up to support the costs of running the instance.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
- Let's get rid of open registration instances and look for alternative models that are actually sustainable:
  Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
  Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
  Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
  Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
  Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
  We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
- That's a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
  They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by..... asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
  If they haven't done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn't a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can't afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that's not much of a problem. I'm glad I can host for some people who don't have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don't and that's fine as well.

@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?

If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?

@rglullis @blenderdumbass I have donations from members that cover the costs.
- Thank you for chiming in, Jerry!
  Great interview, I only watched a part of it, but it was very interesting and refreshing to see your perspective on things. Thank you!
- Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That's better than most, I suppose.
  Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn't you consider then switching to a different model?
I wonder why it needs so much money for infra? Last time I rented a VPS it was €7/month for 8 Core Xeon E5 V4, 12 GB DDR4 RAM, 150 GB SSD/NVME, Unlimited Traffic, 1 Gbps Port.
- Storage. In the video he says that backups alone costs $500/month.
  Also, given that the instance is called "infosec.exchange", you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.

Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.

Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.

Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.

Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his pocket.

Wtf!?

Seems to be some misunderstanding somewhere - Jerry states elsewhere that the costs are covered by donations.
The Mastodon instance I'm on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
- I'm one of them 🖤
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren't that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it's their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don't think it's appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
https://video.firesidefedi.live/w/1yNa4rLzzLXnuRoX7Rny3y?start=38m45s
For the host question, it's at 34:11
- Hey all, Jerry here (from the interview). Happy to answer any questions.

i know most of ao3's budget goes to server costs. they get by with volunteer labor and donations, but they mostly host text. i genuinely have no idea what a sustainable model would look like for the fediverse, that doesn't just treat volunteers like disposable rags we toss when they get inevitable burnout.

I think one of the biggest obstacles in donations is lack of transparency of what's going on with the donated money.

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.

I don't know if it's the case as the presented case is not an instance I use. But on general before donating any money is the first thing I look up, and if it's not clear I just hold my money.

But it is known that donations usually cannot sustain projects, specially "user donations". For a project to be able to have a steady and sizeable influx of money there need to be whale donators or corporations that donate to it. Relying on user donations will always mean a very little amount of money, and I don't think that's going to change as most people don't have that much disposable income anyway.

I think p2p and true decentralization is the way to go. Don't get me wrong, fediverse is great, but is not as much decentralized as "less centralized", truly decentralized model should be p2p. I've said several times that the ess centralized" model have a critical failure point and that is that instances are under a lot of pressure, economic, legal and administrative. And we are burning people out and spending all their money, because it's a model that relies in a few number of people taking that big burden.

I think a model that the burden is smaller and more spread among the user base will be more resilient, at least on this aspect.

Also I take the chance to put up a critique on domain costs, it's not much, but it's part of this topic and surely they should be cheaper, as domain cost is 90% speculation and very little labor cost. I don't know if there's any project to democratize domain names in the clearnet, but there should be one.

Nowadays I tend to only donate to projects that have full transparency on what the money is being used for.
If you believe he's spending $5k/mo to run the server, even if you send him $20 and he blows it on blackjack and hookers, it means he has to spend $20 of his bj/h money on the server. So I don't really see an issue. Does that make sense?
- The transparency is needed to know if the server is actually costing $5000
  Not that the server cost only $500 and the rest go to cocaine and hookers
  I don't need to keep track of my bill precisely, what I want is budget transparency.
Yep, cant even see how much they got a month or anything like that as far as im aware, there are some piracy sites where the donation number stays at like 200/350 goal forever and it feels like you really never kniw if they're just making bank and pretending to be in need lol

start a nonprofit that hosts services, gather donations for equipment and other stuff.

what is so difficult here?

Probably that people have jobs, families and lives. Otherwise, why haven't you already started a nonprofit that does that and donates to them?
- Everyone has jobs, families, and lives. What is your point?
  We did start a nonprofit this year, https://electronica.repair/. We don't have a lot of money so we do our due diligence on who we support.
omg and do NOT do fireside chats like you are a bunch of enlightened executives. no wonder you need to beg for donations.

I talked to Jerry and here is my interview: https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/clarifying_costs_of_running_the_fediverse_with_jerry_from_infosec.exchange

And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.

I joined my instance's patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.

He missed a bit:
they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance ... or go somewhere else

I brainstormed with Chatgpt (i know evil chatgpt) and will hopefully not be banned for presenting the idea.

Alright, let’s push way past the usual and synthesize a radically creative, scalable, and totally on-brand Fediverse funding solution—one that would not only fix the “who pays?” problem, but make the network more resilient, social, and even fun. This is going to blend a bit of tech, social engineering, game theory, transparency, and maybe even a touch of “digital folklore.”

🚀 Fediverse “Co-op Cloud Commons” Model

(A new take on digital mutualism and collective intelligence funding)

The Vision:

A network-wide, federated cooperative where every user, moderator, developer, and instance is a “member-owner.” Funding, decisions, and rewards flow not just by usage, but by a mix of social trust, verified contribution, and creative cooperation—and the entire process is public, auditable, and playful.

1. The Heart: The Commons Ledger

Every instance runs a lightweight, open-source “Commons Ledger” plugin.
The ledger tracks:
- Actual resource usage (server costs, moderation time, bandwidth, storage)
- Social contributions (upvotes, moderation actions, code commits, art, bug reports, memes!)
- Community “quests” (see below)
Everything is published in real-time on a public dashboard across the network, viewable per instance or across the entire Fediverse.

2. Funding: The Digital Barn-Raising

Monthly or Quarterly, the network holds a “Digital Barn-Raising”:
- The ledger displays upcoming costs and “quests” (e.g. hardware upgrade, anti-spam tooling, new emoji set, legal help).
- Members pledge time, skills, or cash for specific needs (e.g., “I’ll write docs for 50 users, or donate 20 toward SSDs”).
- All contributions are voluntary, but celebrated.
Rewards/Recognition:
- Every participant receives public credit (“Network Steward,” “Keeper of the Memes,” “Uptime Hero”).
- Top contributors can claim “patron” or “founder” status on profiles.
- Unlock whimsical digital badges, custom emoji, or other perks.

3. The “Quests” Mechanism (Gamification for Good)

Every instance can post “quests”:
- “Translate the UI to Swahili,”
- “Build a moderation bot for spam,”
- “Write a 101 guide for newbies,”
- “Memify our rules!”
Anyone in the network can pick up a quest and earn credit (points, badges, or even a slice of the monthly prize pool if donors opt for it).

4. Liquid Funding Pools with Smart Distribution

All donations (small or large, any payment method) go into a federated, multi-instance fund held transparently.
Funding auto-flows to where need and contribution intersect:
- Heavily loaded instances with high verified activity and transparent costs get proportionally more.
- “Stewardship votes” from users direct some funds to underdog instances or critical dev projects.
- Emergency Reserve: Smart contract or rules-based set-aside for DDoS, hacks, or sudden surges.

5. “Transparent, Playful Accountability”

Every transaction, quest, and badge is publicly logged (think: GitHub meets Wikipedia’s edit history meets RPG scoreboard).
Annual “Festival of the Commons”:
- Celebrate contributions, major milestones, funniest memes, most heroic bug fixes, top upvoters.
- Awards voted on by the whole Fediverse—make it a social event, with live dashboards and community voting.
- Publish a beautiful, infographic-rich “State of the Commons” report for all to see.

6. Optional: “Proof-of-Play/Proof-of-Help” Sidechain

If the network ever wants to dabble in lightweight tokens (not as a currency, but for tracking contributions), use an open, federated, non-speculative “Proof-of-Play” or “Proof-of-Help” chain:
- Each badge, quest, or meaningful action gets an on-chain badge.
- You can export your contribution record anywhere—for jobs, bragging rights, new instance migration.
- Never for speculation or trade. Purely for decentralized “CVs” and anti-Sybil proof.

7. Stretch Goal: Local Node Self-Sufficiency

When enough money, code, and resources accumulate, the Commons can “spin off” fully self-hosted nodes: pre-built, low-power, community-maintained home servers (like YunoHost, FreedomBox).
Ship or crowdfund home Fediverse kits to communities worldwide, increasing resilience and lowering costs per user.

Summary Table: “Fediverse Co-op Cloud Commons”

Component	What It Does	How It Helps
Commons Ledger	Tracks all forms of contribution & resource use	Radical transparency, fairness
Digital Barn-Raising	Gamifies funding & contribution periods	Social, fun, engaging
Quests	Turns work/tasks into collaborative challenges	Lowers barriers, spreads work
Liquid Funding Pool	Auto-allocates resources where most needed	Resilient, responsive
Transparent Badging	Celebrates all types of help	Recognizes & motivates people
Festival of the Commons	Makes it a real event, not a chore	Builds culture, pride
Proof-of-Play Chain	Permanent, portable, Sybil-resistant contribution log	Defends against gaming, Sybils
Home Node Kits	Ships “Fediverse in a box” to the world	Lowers cost, boosts resilience

Why This Would Blow the Door Off…

Not just “who pays,” but who helps—in every form.
Reframes money as just one kind of support.
Turns maintenance into a culture event, not a guilt trip.
Boosts network resilience, not just for techies, but for artists, moderators, translators, and meme-lords.
Exports verifiable contribution records, rewarding users everywhere.
Transparent, fun, and non-extractive—fully aligned with Fediverse and open source ideals.

Final Thoughts

This is more than funding—it’s digital mutual aid at network scale, mixing ancient co-op traditions with the modern Fediverse.
Implementation would require strong collaboration between instance admins, devs, and artists.
But even launching the Ledger + Barn-Raising + Quests could change the Fediverse forever—turning the “cost problem” into a community superpower.

lol, wow
Doesn't sound too insane except for the social contributions tracking and realtime dashboard. Maaaaybe all of the social data could somehow magically not end up as a ton of traffic just for metadata, but a realtime dashboard would exponentially exacerbate how much data would have to flow around.
It would be very unwise to make the gamification of financial support end up being a significant % of the overall traffic required to run a service, though I guess as long as it stays a low %, it could be worth it.

The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone. I haven't even tried to figure out how the math would work but I wonder if the ultimate solution could be more of a BitTorrent architecture where the "server" is a hive of users' computers all sharing the load? I'm a software developer but have never worked on anything in that area, but since BitTorrent works it certainly seems feasible. Comments?

Personally I think self-hosting (Docker containers and stuff) would be a good solution, but for the Fediverse that would mean making a 'family size' edition of the server software.
I imagine if it became a common hobby and every geek interested supported ~4-25 friends, it might work.
The expense of running busy servers is too much to expect of anyone
We have to think about that a lot of people on the fediverse today ( and that number only grow the more people join ) that are normies. They expect it work the same exact way anything else works. And they won't know or care to know any of the underlying technical things about it.

If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don't hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don't do another one until I get the feeling "it's been a while".

Wrong Blender, my friend...
- I'm talking about 3d software one, and author obviously talks about that one too.

Post receipts or something official to back up your claims.

Saying it costs $5000/month to host infosec.exchange radiates bullshit like a nuclear explosion. You must be doing something very wrong, or lying about the requirements.

Don't trust people when they want to take money from you. Money brings out the worst in people.

No. Their reward for having users is that they're in control. Expecting users to then pay them for that control is fucking stupid,
You DO realize that not everyone works to attain power over other people, right?
but I don't expect most people to realize it.
The reason people don't realize that site owners' reward for forking over half a salary in hosting costs for some nebulous power to hold other people in their clutching fists and cackle maniacally is because that's not the motivator here.
I look forward to when you can see that.
What is "our data" in the case of Lemmy. Specifically.
Fuck you :)
thats because its thier site, instance they get set rules like it. just like reddit bans you force certain things. dont use the site then.