The official blog of Fosstodon, a Mastodon instance for open source enthusiasts, covering funding, moderation, and server operations.
HN commenters use it for hosting cost details and funding, while some doubt its claims about Cloudflare and ask for more hosting information.
To go into the wider context, see
https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-kev-and-snowflakes/
https://olimex.wordpress.com/2020/03/05/bye-bye-mastodon-our-account-on-fosstodon-org-was-deleted-yesterday/
If there is a population on Mastodon that bothers me it is the "anti-resilient" people who think that disabled people are morally better than abled people, who build identities around suffering chronic pain, accuse you of being a "reply guy" simply because you hit "reply", see "marginalization" as a goal or destination [1], etc.
I have a good time on Mastodon because I systematically mute and block those sorts of people, mostly don't engage with them. I've yet to have anyone triggered by the "anti-resilient" concept, in fact it is common you can criticize the othering and other fascist-adjacent behaviors of an anti-fascist for days in the abstract in which case they will assume you are talking about an "other" until finally you tell them directly that you're talking about them.
I've met quite a few women on line and real life for whom chronic pain is a way of life and something they have in common is that they'll resist any insinuation that anything about their condition is in their mind/brain. People like that believe they are stronger in numbers but actually when they get together they drag each other down. You could be marginalized in the sense of "in the margin", but join an anti-support group and you can now be marginalized and hated rather than simply…
This simply does not scale.
Small instances from enthusiasts are being funded by the person/people running it, but if we assume that one "small instance" can serve up to 100 people while costing pocket change to the admin, we would need 20 million "hobbyists" running their instances if the fediverse is to become an alternative to Facebook or Instagram.
Larger instances based on donations are all struggling. Fosstodon started open and donation based and promised to take any surplus and donate to the upstream projects. Their last donation was in 2021 [0]. Now they even closed down for new signups and made it invite-only. Newsie.social, an instance made for journalists have 20000 sign ups, 2300 active users and less than 2% of the active user base contributes. The admin has been pleading for support in an attempt to keep it open, but it's quite likely they will announce it will close. It's ridiculous.
[0]: https://hub.fosstodon.org/finances/
From some non-exhaustive research, there are many: social.coop, chaos.social, social.tchncs.de, nerdica.de (friendica) -- seem to have governance. I believe, mastodon.xyz, fosstodon.org among others have transparent donations. (I believe mastodon.xyz uses the default source)
I agree that you should seek more open governance, at least transparent finances and active open source, (technically that's covered by AGPL), because otherwise the server could go at any time, and it violates the spirit of federation in the first place.
Here's a nice transparency report: https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/
Did they ever clear up their more-than-doubtful claims about their relationship with Cloudflare?
They recently claimed that "Even when we’re under attack, we still don’t use their TLS certificates, so Cloudflare will NEVER content inspect our traffic."
Cloudflare DOES NOT offer a passthrough-TLS option.
https://hub.fosstodon.org/fosstodon-and-cloudflare
This was pointed out with no response which makes me doubt more than just their technical abilities...
https://framapiaf.org/@remram44/110831829849477595
> I would be shocked if an instance cost more than $40/month to host, and I'd reckon the typical instance is less than $20/month.
That information is public for at least one moderately popular instance, fosstodon.org. According to https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding the current cost is $1895.50 per month, plus $200.00 for the CDN. (And yes, last time I looked, their Patreon is going to be more than enough to cover that.)
All costs are detailed here: https://hub.fosstodon.org/about/#current-funding
Yes it could be done cheaper, if they did more work themselves. The masto.host service they're using is basically Mastodon as a service - aka they're paying someone to host (and manage) a Mastodon instance.
All in all fair value for the money IMO.