I asked around so-called influencers why they were not on #Mastodon . Here are the most common replies:
1) We can't go viral on Mastodon (read as we can't game the system because humans only boost good stuff)
2) They want a algo driven system (why do you want to see angry posts all day & night?)
3) You can't make money on Mastodon (WTF that even mean?)
4) It is way too technical & confusing. Which server to join? WTF is the server?
Only the last one is valid. The rest are all lazy reasons.
The disdain for anyone that makes money through content online, is palpable. I'm not trying to change your opinion on that. I'm just pointing it out.
Going viral doesn't mean gaming the system. Most content goes viral because it is novel, entertaining, and fun.
And as I've said on here many, many times, the most viewed content on social media by far isn't angry content. It's happy/funny content. Twitter and 4chan are miserable places. TikTok and Instagram are happier places.
I see a lot of replies of the form:
"You can make money on Mastodon! You just have to do A, B, and C! It works!"
And:
"We don't want influencers on Mastodon."
The thing I find funny about the "You can make money on Mastodon!" claim, is that it's almost always proclaimed by Mastodon dudes that don't make any money through their social media content, talking about people that do make money on their social media content. 0% experience, 100% confidence.🙂🙃
2/N
I've seen authors get roasted on here for promoting their own books.
I've seen server admins get insulted for suggesting moving to a subscription model rather than a donation model.
I haven't seen many (any?) examples of people being financially successful on Mastodon with a "here's how I did it!" tutorial with real numbers. I just see vague hand-wavings about "It's totally possible!" but when I ask for concrete examples, it gets real quiet. 🤷🏿♂️
@[email protected] @[email protected] Minimum wage in NYC is $16/hr. At 52 weeks working 40 hrs a week, that's ~35K a year. Is nixCraft making $35K a year on Mastodon? I hope so! But I doubt it. If they are, how are they doing that? What mechanism are they using to be paid for their labor and craftsmanship? Donations? Subscriptions? (And $35K is not enough to cover the average 1 bedroom rent in NYC. Let alone pay for food, health insurance, clothes, and utilities). People deserve to be paid for their labor.
@mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft I'm fairly financially successful with monetization on Mastodon, and do publish figures (but it's been a while since I've written an updated article)
YTD I've made €7,713.27 in gross revenue from the community, or between €500-1500 a month. That's across 3 channels, excluding GitHub Sponsors.
Last year was €8,497.03 from supporters, averaging €40 per transaction.
@thisismissem @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I hope you do realize that this is less than minimum wage? How much was that per hour of work?
Can you honestly say that this is "financial success" and that it could be emulated by others if one could make more money delivering food and biking around the city?
@raphael @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I've only been tracking open-source contributions in terms of hours since the Q2 of this year. This year so far I have done 184 hours of work on open-source, of which 21.50 hours were funded separately and 8 hours of admin work.
I fully agree that the community support I receive is currently well below minimum wage, which is why I'm trying to increase that income.
I've also done a lot of freelance work to make ends meet, which balanced things out.
@raphael @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
As for is this "financial success", well, it's my full time job, I have no other employment besides the community funding, grants, and freelance work.
I don't work for any for-profit company. I meet my needs.
Note: I'm excluding from those numbers the grants and freelance work, which is the lions share of my income.
@thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
Hot take:
People think that the Fediverse isn't safe(yet) because of slight differences between how you see the world, and Eugen sees the world, and Ro sees the world, and Oliphant sees the world, and Jaz sees the world, and Sierdy sees the world, and Hrefna sees the world, etc.
But the real reason the Fediverse is not safe and secure (yet), is that none of you can earn a stable and secure living working on Fediverse safety full time.🤷🏿♂️
1/N
@thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
I am profoundly uninterested in giving my hot take nitpicking ideas on how any of you should be thinking about safety. And I don't think we want or need consensus.
I am deeply interested in how we change state to where you all can earn a living working on this stuff full-time, in a way that avoids the usual "money with downsides and baggage" like VC money, or becoming dependent on wealthy benefactors who may change their minds (eg Big Tech grants).
2/2
@mekkaokereke @raphael @april @nixCraft for full disclosure, my total revenue year to date, excluding open/future invoices is €44,960 with €4,210.61 in expenses.
So I have made a decent income for a developer based in Germany, where a less-experienced developer would make €40-45k, and experienced developers would be €60-90k.
That's including freelance contracts, bug bounties, grants, etc.
@mekkaokereke @raphael @april @nixCraft
But yeah, the Fediverse as a whole is extremely underfunded, and that only changes with people wanting to say “I value this and I want to fund it's existence”
I value the Fediverse and want to fund its existence. I don't want to simply set money on fire. What are my options?
My charity budget is completely allocated. My investment budget is not.
I think that's a critical challenge, if someone solves that without breaking the ideals, it would be beyond awesome.
@iwein @mekkaokereke @raphael @april @nixCraft
There isn't really ROI for stuff that is open-source, and that's where we really need the money, not in for-profit services.
@thisismissem @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
If you get for-profit services, they will be more than aligned with the sustainability of the open source part.
For example: I already pledged to give 20% of communick's profits to the underlying projects. The only "problem" is that communick will never be profitable for as long as it's competing with large instances (hachyderm/.world/universeodon) that have no intention/plan to become proper businesses.
@raphael @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I'm pretty sure instances run not for profit aren't your enemy. Last I heard Masto.host was doing pretty okay. Their smallest plan is 3 times your smallest plan in cost.
It's easy as a business owner to blame others for the challenges you face in building & growing a business, it's a lot harder to raise to the challenges and reassess your decisions
@raphael @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
Also, fwiw, those larger instances have been funding development work. Nivenly (the organisation behind hachyderm) has funded several grants and has a security bug bounty program for the fediverse that's been quietly existing for most of the year.
They also give significant product feedback & test out new things.
@thisismissem @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
Organizations that provide funding for development provide a function that is orthogonal to bearing the operational costs of running an instance with many active users.
@raphael @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
And I'm saying that the instance you listed all help fund the development, not just operating their own instance.
e.g., earlier this year Nivenly paid me for fixing a security vulnerability in pixelfed which was CVE 9.9/10
Nivenly also provides me invaluable feedback on my work developing Mastodon. Not all beneficial relationships are financial, some are symbiotic where a developer can gain knowledge and feedback from people using tools everyday
@raphael @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
Nivenly has also filed several bugs raising things to our attention where moderator needs weren't being met; you've, as far as I can tell contributed exactly one issue to the project.
@thisismissem @raphael from my perspective you're in the same boat, even if you don't 100% agree and contributions are very different. I fund both dev and instance with a modest donation.
It's helpful also to make things investible and/or profitable (not the same thing). There's orders of magnitude more money available there.
Totally ok if that's not your problem to solve now, but somebody should step up to help. You can call the community, users, me, out on that. I hear you.
@thisismissem @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
Masto.host is managed hosting, the customer gets full control over the server. This is not the same as charging per account.
@raphael @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
That's not how your website reads. Maybe how you're positioning your business isn't right for the market that exists, it happens. There's several "pay to use" instances that are doing fine, e.g., social.coop
@thisismissem @iwein @mekkaokereke @april @nixCraft
I have both. The website's copy is indeed confusing because I added managed hosting later.
I would pay for joining an instance if they provide me some really good advantage like (boosted search engine? Exclusive client with cool features? Useful automations...) OR if the instance is for a project/community/foundation that I support.
What is the selling point of your 29/y accounts?
Do you think that, e.g, fastmail needs to offer something extra on top of their email service, or that "pure" hosting is a legitimate business in itself?
@raphael @thisismissem
fastmail solves a problem that doesn't exist yet in the mastoverse, I would pay for fastmail for reasons: Liberate me from big tech domains (gmail...), privacy (my data is encrypted, no advertising recommendation), use my own domain, faster and reliable.
I could get those things hosting my own mail server but that is difficult and expensive to maintain, so fastmail is worth paying.
In the case of Social Microblogging, what does your service do different? why I would signup instead of running my own one-click instance or joining a big community instance? encryption for my DMs? guaranteed delivery of all activities? Route my own domain? privacy control?
Pitch 1.
Pay me 29/y and I give you an ordinary Mastodon account + (lemmy and matrix if you care), and that is all.
Pitch 2.
I offer a unique mastodon account on a high availability server, the list of guarantees [...], exclusive features and improvements as you can see on [...], a very unique and exclusive web and mobile client that extends mastodon functionalities, route your own domain to your account, monitoring panel etc..
All of this for 290/y
It will ve very easier to get me in for 10x the price because the option 2 really offer advantages, fill the gaps, solve problems.
How to get all those features working? well that is why it is called "work" you need a team, a plan, a business model etc...
One can't just offer the bare account with no differences/advantages and charge for it, unless this one is a project/community/non-profit/club etc...
> How to get all those features working? well that is why it is called "work" you need a team, a plan, a business model etc...
You also need *money* and time to develop all these things without revenue. How are you going to get that?
Requirement: if the answer includes any form of "Venture Capital", it is the wrong answer.
VC is not the only model, you can bootstrap with a group of friends, you can make open-source software funded by donations, you can apply for funding programs.
What you can't do is blaming indie hackers, hobbyists, communities that offer the same thing for free for the unsuccessful business model you may have.
> you can make open-source software funded by donations
Like Mastodon, the largest AP project, whose CEO *until today* makes ~30k€/year, less than an intern at a Big Tech?
> you can apply for funding programs.
I did that for Fediverser. 10 months waiting for the grant to be approved, money for ~1 month of work.
> What you can't do is blaming indie hackers (...) that offer the same thing for free.
I'm not "blaming" those who offer. What I am saying for the past two years is that we need a culture change in relation from the *users*. I'm saying "you get what you pay for".
If the majority of people keep expecting things to be given/offered for free, there will never be a mature ecosystem and it will be forever a niche thing, always staying behind Big Tech.
> One can't just offer the bare account with no differences/advantages and charge for it, unless this one is a project/community/non-profit/club etc...
One can, and one does. Whether you think this is something you'd be willing to pay for is a completely different.
Replace fastmail with migadu or any other email hosting service. The point still stands.
@rafaelmartins @raphael I got the point that you are unhappy as a fastmail customer, but this convo is not about it, it is about having a business model to sell, to convince people to pay for it (regardless of the quality) supposedly, there is the need to offer something that solves real problems,
getting a bare mastodon account is not a real problem, actually it is free, actually there are companies literally paying (as hosting the service) for you to join (e.g Vivaldi)
> getting a bare mastodon account is not a real problem, actually it is free
Remember "if you are not paying for the product, you are the product" ?
Why is it that we seem to casually ignore this when it comes to open projects?
My *whole argument* from https://raphael.lullis.net/community-is-not-enough/ is that we need more people willing to pay for something *even if they are made available for free*.
It's not because something does not have a price that it does not have a cost.
How many instances disappeared overnight because the admins were overwhelmed with the user influx, or failed to keep it secure, or could not deal with the moderation, or shut down because they hit an unrecoverable database corruption...
My (few) customers pay me because they want a worry-free experience, and this is what I strive to provide.
@raphael Please clarify one thing for me, your business, communick, what does it offer?
Are you offering hosting services, like my own mastodon instance managed by you for 29/y
Or are you just selling accounts on your 3 users instance for 29/y ?
What makes your business offer interesting? what differs it from all the free instances available?
That is exactly why so many Foss projects have been gobbled up by VC sharks as @mekkaokereke already pointed out.
I love that you're publicly brainstorming about this. There's a lot at stake for all of us.
@iwein @thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
The Nivenly Foundation has given grants to many of the folk I mentioned in this post. ♥️👍🏿
https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113177194652670163
I'd say either give to one of those folks directly, or give to Nivenly.
Speaking of investment, the goal is not to create a new part of the non-profit world, where these orgs are dependent on philanthropy. The goal is to bootstrap these orgs and help them become independent, running without VC or philanthropy
@thisismissem @[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] Hot take: People think that the Fediverse isn't safe(yet) because of slight differences between how you see the world, and Eugen sees the world, and Ro sees the world, and Oliphant sees the world, and Jaz sees the world, and Sierdy sees the world, and Hrefna sees the world, etc. But the real reason the Fediverse is not safe and secure (yet), is that none of you can earn a stable and secure living working on Fediverse safety full time.🤷🏿♂️ 1/N
@polotek @iwein @thisismissem @raphael @april @nixCraft
Super fair question.
I think moderation is a service. It makes sense to me to subscribe to that service, and to be billed periodically.
Right now though there's a large gap between "what people are willing to pay for that service," and "how much that service really costs to provide." This is obscured by the fact that most moderation is 100% volunteer today. 🤷🏿♂️
Here are my personal thoughts about how we could handle Trust & Safety features in Mastodon software. This is based on my own experience in the field, my current knowledge of the source code and architecture, as well as my experience managing infrastructure for mastodon.social & mastodon.online since December 2022. Context Managing a Mastodon instance is hard work, with the most effort going to moderation and abuse, and not technical operations as one might expect. This includes:
nixCraft 🐧
mekka okereke 
April (@39c3) The Pink ⋆☾╶⃝⃤☽⋆ [AS208709]
Emelia 👸🏻
Raphael Lullis
iwein
Bruno Cesar Rocha ★ rochacbruno
Rafael Martins
malte
Marco Rogers
Marc Hedlund
Kevin Riggle
Renaud Chaput