Mastodawn

KuJoe 💞May 15, 2025

If any Mastodon instances are having trouble with their costs growing out of control, ping me and see if I can help lower your bill.

Apparently a recently closed instance was paying $300/month for hosting which is insane to read considering how small of an instance it was. When we had 40k monthly users I was paying about $120/month so an instance with less than 400 total users (not MAU) should be super cheap to run even with a few TB of storage and bandwidth.

It hurts my heart to read instances closing down over costs and finding out they’re paying more than instances 10x their size. 😢

https://newsie.social/@jeff/114513118997692099

Jeff (of the internet) (@[email protected])

Attached: 1 image Another Mastodon server gone. Airwaves.Social shut down & off the air for good. Reason: Costs! https://vmst.io/@User47/114508192446827453 Running a Mastodon server isn’t free & it’s often thankless. But it is essential. If you value independent, community-run spaces, now’s the time to chip in to your favorite server/instances Your server admins can’t keep the lights on with vibes alone. Want to Suport Newsie or Journa.host? DO IT! OpenCollective: https://opencollective.com/newsiesocial#category-CONTRIBUTE PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=BCV5VZ5HRMB3U

Newsie

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pescetarian May 15, 2025

@KuJoe Let's be honest, those who say that they pay $300 for an instance are disingenuous... They want to earn some extra money, probably this is normal, but we all know that the costs are much lower in reality... Or is it not all?!

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chebra May 16, 2025

@pescetarian @KuJoe

I've seen two recently:
- https://mastodon.world/@ruud/114465666503843219
- https://pleroma.envs.net/objects/f33ad271-aee7-4cee-bcd0-f97823a91feb

Ruud (@[email protected])

It's been a while since I posted something on our blog, I'll create a new post soon. I want to communicate about the finances and then start a fundraising campaign on all our instances, because currently the donations aren't covering the costs anymore. TL;DR last month we spent 1905 EUR and raised 1710 EUR. (The 2 previous months we did some fundraising and raised more than we spent so we still have reserves) mastodon.world lemmy.world sharkey.world friendica.world bookwyrm.world toot.community

Mastodon

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KuJoe 💞May 16, 2025

@chebra both of those posts are depressing to read. Server admins shouldn't have to worry about finances, they should be focused on running their instances.

I'm sure the admins are doing the best they can with the information they have, I just hope they find some help before they post the dreaded "farewell" post when funding dries up. 🙁

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chebra

@KuJoe true that. And also, especially when the costs get this high, it feels like donating is just sending more money to the big hosting corporations. So I definitely like the idea with helping to make a more efficient setup. And maybe another idea would be to make the software itself more efficient, so that more people can run it sustainably. #snac is a minimalistic mastodon server, but there are likely many improvements possible also in the main mastodon software. More instances is better.