My Netizen's Guide to the Fediverse is now at 36 polls with some pretty interesting insights.

https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/a-netizens-guide-to-mastodon-fediverse

#fediverse #polls

My favorite ones, of course, are the polls showing how we're willing to keep fediverse alive with our own money.

https://stefanbohacek.online/@stefan/110306418229085517

https://mastodon.social/@atomicpoet/109978997531754001

https://fosstodon.org/@amoroso/110248868482042877

#fediverse #polls

Nicely contrasted with comments like these.

#fediverse #ads #sustainability

Oh, even better.

#fediverse #sustainability #ads #monetization

@stefan

Maybe you can make a #poll to help me answer one thing...

I'm running a commercial instance (meaning, access is only for those that pay for a subscription) with prices that can go as low as $0.50/month/user ($5/month, and you can invite 10 people to come with you)

My question is: why is it that there are people willing to pay $5, $10, $20/month to some donation-based server, but balk at the idea of patronizing a business than can offer them a better deal?

@raphael I think what works for most servers is that you are free to join, and those who can often cover the price it costs to support multiple other members.

@stefan Let's just be careful to celebrate victory too soon. I am HOPING it will be successful long term, but there are a few caveats.
1. There are roughly 500 million tweets sent PER DAY. The Fediverse recently crossed a billion PER MONTH -- a VAST difference. With increased scale, comes vastly increased hosting/bandwidth/caching/etc costs (especially with so much duplication of data due to the nature of the decentralized fediverse — which I know some projects are trying to mitigate).
...cont…

@stefan 2. Right now we have a LOT of enthusiasts, early-adopters on the fediverse. Those are EXACTLY the kind of people who don't mind (or even like to) pay for good tech/solutions. If the fediverse explodes amongst "regular" people, time & time again, we've seen they are NOT prepared to pay for online services. So the percentage of people paying/contributing will go down as the fediverse scales up. This is a bad combo (for reasons in point 1).

So let's see how this think shakes up!

@leoncowle Yes, those are all good points, thank you!

Really hard not to get excited, but definitely a good idea to stay cautious.

It will also be interesting to see the impact of Meta's Project Barcelona, for sure.

@stefan I know that is their idea, but I'm yet to see any large instance that is sustainable (financially- and labor-wise) on this model. I wrote about this on https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/ but the gist is:

- the free riders far outnumber the donors

- free riders have nothing to lose with bad behavior and are more likely to create problems for moderators

- the instance gets big but is fully dependent on volunteers who end up burning out or lose interest when the original "community" is lost.

@raphael This is a very good post, and I appreciate you sharing it!

As I've said a few times, we're still very much in the early days of the fediverse, and it will be interesting to see how things progress from here.

This is a really awesome blog by @stefan .

Some of the polls have REALLY small samples and I don't think really represent the view of the larger fediverse, but It's fun to read nonetheless.

I especially like the parts where people share that they would be willing to donate to their instance AND that users tend to value smaller more intimate instances.

this is the way.

RE: https://stefanbohacek.online/users/stefan/statuses/110412722585702784

@twizzay Glad you enjoyed reading this, and thank you for sharing!

Definitely agree on the sample size. It might be worth re-running some of these.

don't forget that hosting your own server is cheap, and probably one of the best things you can do to keep fedi decentralized and awesome.

It's also a great way to get more control over your social media.