Followup: (because enough eyeballs mean you have to explicitly state assumptions)

...If you can afford, and you get value out of using Mastodon.

Now to get real with you:

- The majority of you can afford to, use it often, and don't pay. You know that.

- Those of you who can't; that's OK. Most instance admins are *happy* to provide you a place to be and voice to have. Happy to.

- The issue is much more that many people don't even consider contributing. Not that some people can't afford to.

How bad is the problem?

I have no idea but lets do back-of-the-envelope maths...

- my instance is €600 short this month.
- Lets assume half is already covered. Sounds realistic. So €1200/m.
- 14,000 active users. Lets share that:
- €1200 / 14,000 = €0.086

To cover costs each active user would need to pay ~9 cents per month.

Lets imagine the average contributor pays €5/m. 1200/5 = 240 people.

Leaving 13,700 not paying.

i.e., it takes 1.7% of people paying €5/m to cover the whole thing.

But Stux is short by half (again, total spit-ball math and realistic-sounding-but-ignorant totals).

So lets assume that €5 is a good average payment for a month of service.

That'd mean that only 0.85% of users are *actually* paying €5/m right now.

THAT is the scope of the issue. The vast majority simply *do not cover their own costs*.

It's the same on all open source services.

Does that sound _fair_ to you?

And this doesn't cover his time on upkeep and running services. That's pure cost.

We can argue a ton about application efficiency, who's asking who to do what, etc. Forget that.

- Does that math sound ballpark right?

- Does it seem fair to you that a tiny minority are expected to support the vast majority?

- Does it seem likely that the vast majority here can't afford the service they use? Can't afford on the order of 9 cents per month if everyone chipped in?

Or does it seem likely that most people simply don't think to support the volunteers providing us things we enjoy?

@lindarosesmit

I'm seeing this in the browser with the regular mastodon interface, and in the lower left corner of the window (below where I'm composing this reply) there's a group of links about Mastodon itself and, above them, a group of links about my instance. The "About" link takes me to a page that includes a ko-fi link for donations.