I’m pretty new to the fediverse, and I find the idea amazing. But one thing concerns me though. How will server owners be able to afford to run servers with massive amounts of data coming through them? Theoretically speaking, if a Reddit migration were to happen how would server upkeep costs look like?
The Mastodon instance sfba.social publishes their financials. They have about 30k total users and costs are about $1,000 USD per month. Donations cover this amount and the extra is saved.
https://hub.sfba.social/2023/04/15/transparency-report-march-2023/
$1kpm for 30k users? Man, Mastodon software is not optimised well…
oops - Users is currently 38k.
What are costs for other server types?
$1k per month for 30k users is $0.03 per user. Usually when companies talk about price per user, they talk per 1,000 users or even per 100k users. 30k users should be totally fine on a bloody Raspberry Pi, that’s not a load for proper server software.