At a meta level, something I find mildly interesting is how many people are writing stuff on Mastodon about how it's impossible for Mastodon to scale up without using an ad supported model (b/c server costs), it's better to have ranked feeds because most people want them, etc.

The thing I think is interesting is that the people writing this stuff, implicitly, seemingly cannot conceive of a model where the organization is not growth and profit maximizing.

If I look at my own site, I make $30k/yr off donations and could easily do 10x that with big ads, but I don't currently need the money enough to put ads up.

Likewise, if you do the math on how much it costs to run a Masto server, even if the fediverse gets way bigger and hosting costs go up, you should be able to run a small instance on donations.

Donations aren't profit maximizing compared to have ranked feeds with ads, but it's ok for there to be things that aren't profit maximizing.

It's so obvious that it's ok for things to not be profit maximizing that it's sort of absurd to think that someone would think that someone would say that things must be profit maximizing, and I think that if you asked the people writing the comments I'm referring to, they'd agree in the abstract that it's ok to not maximize profit.

This is the really insidious thing about absorbing values from the environment around you.

@danluu it has to be sustaining tho, and I suspect that if you hadn't earned big money from your last jobs, you wouldn't be willing to live on 30K/year from your Patreon. Maybe you anticipate growing to a large enough number that it becomes sustaining (100K/year?).

Sustenance has to include paying a fair wage+benefits to the admins.

@heathborders I can't speak for the admins, but I lived on $12k/yr for a long time when I was making a lot more than that as an engineer I don't have any problem living on that much.

I think an instance needs to be quite large before it really needs a full-time admin. This isn't mastodon, but the lobsters admin is very part time and does a great job with that. And HN is huge (surely larger than the largest masto instance) and gets by decently with basically one full-time admin.