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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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”

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

Removed by mod

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

Wtf!?

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

what is so difficult here?

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.