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September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations (blog.mastodon.world)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/support@lemmy.world
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The latest blog post about our .world and the Fedihosting Foundation. As you can read in the blog, the donations are no longer covering our running costs. If you are able to spare a few Euro's or dollars or whatever currency, please check the list of our donation platforms in the blog.

Edit: I will add these to the blog: https://bunq.me/fhf (for EU bank transfers) https://github.com/sponsors/Fedihosting-Foundation (Github Sponsor)

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[โ€“] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

I had a look around the code a while ago, and not only is it lacking in moderation and administration, it's also very much lacking in the distributed computing department.

It's essentially set up in a way that all instances store close to all of the data and that with more instances the traffic and compute costs also scale terribly that way.

Lemmy is pretty close to the limit of its technical capacity.

I wish they had set Lemmy up as a bunch of basically phpBB forums with federated single-sign-on and frontend that can access the backend of all the separate forums transparently. That way each instance would have to only moderate, store and serve their own content instead of multiplying all the work for each instance.

Case in point: The โ‚ฌ1950/month that the .worlds cost is close to โ‚ฌ1 per active user per month. That's a crazy amount.

For a phpBB forum with ~2000 active users you'd expect to pay maybe โ‚ฌ50 per month.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (9 children)

    That doesn't seem right. There are some 37,000 active Lemmy accounts within the past month.

    https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6

    It's well-known that lemmy.world is the biggest instance (or close to it). In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Mastodon users, of which at least a good few per cent are mastodon.world users.

    This would give the Fedihosting Foundation a user count on the order of 10^4^ users. And since their hosting cards are on the order of 10^3^ EUR, this would mean each user costs on the order of 10^-1^ EUR.

    For comparison, Reddit reported 10^8^ daily active users. They also reported cost of revenue at 46 million USD per quarter, meaning they spent on the order of 10^7^ USD per month. So their cost per user is 10^7^ USD divided by 10^8^ users, or 10^-1^ USD.

    https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/news-details/2025/Reddit-Announces-Second-Quarter-2025-Results/default.aspx

    This seems to show that Reddit and Lemmy cost on the same order of magnitude to operate (which, keep in mind, can still mean a 2x or 3x cost difference).

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  • [โ€“] 3 points 1 year ago* (8 children)

    You are right, must have misclicked somewhere for the lemmy.world stats. Here are the real ones: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.world

    15472 monthly active users.

    But your Reddit numbers are off by quite some margin. First, you are comparing Reddit's daily active users to lemmy.world's monthly active users. Reddit has 10^9 monthly active users (1.21 billion, to be exact).

    Also, the ~โ‚ฌ2000 for lemmy.world are pure hosting costs (except of โ‚ฌ153 for donations), but for Reddit you included their whole revenue. That's not even their costs, that's their income.

    I dug through their Earnings press release, and also there they don't specifically talk about their hosting costs. The closest I could find was "General and administrative" costs, which is what's left over of their total costs if you don't take "Cost of revenue", R&D and marketing into consideration, and that's $68.8 million per quarter (~$32 million per month), so 10^7, and that includes salaries and all sorts of other expenses down to the rent of the offices, the PCs their staff use and even the toilet paper. Hosting costs are at best a few percent of that figure, likely much less. So I'd knock that down to 10^6, likely even 10^5

    That would give us $10^-4 to $10^-2 (if all administrative costs are purely hosting costs) per user. That's about the difference between paying โ‚ฌ2000 to host a Lemmy instance with 15k monthly active users and โ‚ฌ50 for hosting a phpBB instance to do the same.

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  • [โ€“] [S] 7 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    The 1700/mo is for all instances we host, with around 30k active users/mo. (If every active user would pay 1 euro per year, it would cover the costs) But it can't be compared to Reddit. Reddit has employees. Employees cost more than infra. If I would pay myself and all the volunteers for the work we put in, the cost would be at least 10 times what it is now.

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 1 year ago*

    Don't get me wrong, I think it's close to heroic what you are doing, I wasn't criticising your efforts or your calculation at all. I'm quite sure you shopped around as much as possible to find the best deal for hosting.

    I'm just talking about the technology behind it, and sadly when it comes to Lemmy, it's sometimes quite painfully obvious that the whole system was built by two randos without a background in distributed computing. It's not exactly efficient.

    In a larger corporation it would count as a good prototype, then they'd scrap it and replace it with the real product. Kinda like how Reddit did it, starting out on Python (web.py was built for Reddit, IIRC), and when they gained enough users they scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using proper distributed computing technologies.

    (Also not criticising the Lemmy developers, since they are two randos who put in a ton of effort to make this thing we can all use for free, and that's pretty impressive too. But it's just not on the same level as stuff made professionally by teams of hundreds of developers.)

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago (5 children)

    The "cost of revenue" is the figure that I am using. In business, cost of revenue is defined as the costs incurred directly to deliver the product to the customer, which is basically just hosting fees.

    Thus I believe 10^7^ USD is correct.

    So the difference is about one order of magnitude, which is still not insignificant.

    Although, it would not surprise me if Reddit makes up most of that order of magnitude in terms of economy of scale, since at some point you would just rent some warehouses and run your own server farms, or at least negotiate better hosting rates if you're spending millions on hosting every month.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago* (4 children)

    Cost of revenue is $45.9 Million per quarter, so ~$15.3 per month. That's even less than the administrative cost. And again, this certainly includes the salary for everyone working on running the services, including admins, content moderators, support and so on, and that's going to be much, much less than the pure cost of hosting. (Yes, they outsource some moderation to volunteers, but certainly not all of it.)

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    15.3 million is the same order of magnitude as 10^7^. I don't see what the issue is with saying the cost of hosting is "on the order of 10^7^" here, unless you somehow think they are spending US$5 million a year on salaries of people who are directly involved in the provision of the product to the users? That would be US$60 million a year or enough to pay 600 people a six-figure salary, which I guarantee their employees are not all so well-paid.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Include the salary for admin and mods in the figure for lemmy and we are not at 10^3 for Lemmy either. The figure for lemmy includes only the pure hosting cost, while the figure for Reddit involves a ton more.

    Reddit has 2233 full-time employees. If only half of them are working on the product, and you take $60mio a year as the budget, that would be $53700 per year and would include taxes, benefits and all that. Doesn't strike me as an unrealistic salary, for people like admins, mods, support, devops, provisioning and all that.

    Remember, we don't have "hosting costs" as a figure for Reddit. We have "Cost of revenue" and that includes anything that goes into running the site. We can't compare numbers that we don't have.

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  • [โ€“] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Based on the fact that four times as much was spent on R&D, and almost three times as much was spent on sales and marketing, and even administration spent 50% more, I'm pretty confident that most employees are not working on "cost of revenue".

    Your bringing up admin salaries is a perfect example of economies of scale. You can easily mind a 1,000,000-user community with ten or twenty moderators. But 10,000 users still need at least two or three people minding them. Anecdotally, smaller online public groups seem to have more troublemakers per capita, to an extent.

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  • [โ€“] 2 points 1 year ago

    Since the admin salaries aren't counted in the .world figure, it doesn't matter how well that scales. That's why we are trying to take them out of the equation.

    Regardless of the actual numbers for reddit (which we plainly just don't have), we do have numbers for plain old forums (e.g. phpBB) which provide a very similar service as Lemmy. And these numbers are far lower that what the .worlds pay.

    The main issue here is replication. Each instance needs to store everything of all instances. That requires a ton of storage and that's not for free. With a network of conventional forums you don't have that issue.

    Or to put it differently: If Lemmy was the size of Reddit (1.2 billion monthly users or roughly 32000x the size of Lemmy right now) and the number of instances scaled accordingly, there would be about 11.6 million instances, each hosting a copy of almost all the content. That's a crazy amount of replication that increases the cost for everyone enormously. Because not only are there more instances that need to pay hosting costs, but the costs for each instance balloon as well.

    But there's an even bigger issue with the replication: Since everything is replicated, the owner of an instance can get into legal trouble for illegal stuff hosted on the instance, say e.g. illegal kinds of pornography or e.g. in the UK any kind of age-restricted content if they don't do age verification.

    That means an admin can't just rely on other instances doing their modding correctly, but effectively every instance needs to moderate all federated content too.

    That is a strain for 40k users (enough strain to e.g. close down lemmy.ee), but it becomes entirely unmanageable for 1.2 billion users.

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