| Homepage | https://chris.improbable.org |
| GitHub | https://github.com/acdha |
A young German man left the country by kayak in 1932, and spent 7 years kayaking all the way to Australia, only to be interned as an enemy alien. [In the 1st camp he was in, he met *another* German who emigrated by kayak, albeit only as far as Beirut.] A strange, resilient life.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/abc-rewind/abc-rewind/105368900
That story about an AI startup collapsing after it turned out to be 700 Indian developers in a Trenchcoat? It was a made up story by a crypto guy that became clickbait, published unchecked by tech media everywhere. Read the real story behind Builder.ai here: https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/
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The claim that the AI startup āfaked AIā with hundreds of engineers went viral ā and I also fell for it, initially. The reality is much more sobering: Builder.ai built a code generator on top of Claude and other LLMs; it did not build a so-called āMechanical Turk.ā
Translation: āAll these continents are yours except Antarctica. Attempt no settlements there!ā
https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/strange-radio-pulses-detected-coming-ice-antarctica
A cosmic particle detector in Antarctica has emitted a series of bizarre signals that defy the current understanding of particle physics, according to an international research group that includes scientists from Penn State.
Please tell people when you find work they have done to be good.
We just had a client mail and tell us that the spam issue has stopped, and thanks to recent work we did they've just had a booking for 16 people at their project "thank you".
We all perked up so much.
We do good work, but praise or appreciation is _rare_.
#Python 3.13.5, aka "oops".
If you use Mastodon; please pay for your use. Please.
This is not the corporate web of Twitter and Google. No company is paying for your use of this service. Your use of the service is not being sold to ad companies.
You use it? That is costing your admin owner literal actual money.
Pay for things you like. Or they go away. Or they stay but get taken over by exploitative people that will eventually destroy it.
Please, find your instance owner and pay them some money.
Thanks.
Mikeal Rogers, my best friend, my colleague, confidant, and one of a kind partner in countless late night chats and restless travel sprints, has died. Mikeal died of aggressive cancer. Words feel wholly inadequate because I want to capture the sweep of what he meant to me and to the
If you use Mastodon; please pay for your use. Please.
This is not the corporate web of Twitter and Google. No company is paying for your use of this service. Your use of the service is not being sold to ad companies.
You use it? That is costing your admin owner literal actual money.
Pay for things you like. Or they go away. Or they stay but get taken over by exploitative people that will eventually destroy it.
Please, find your instance owner and pay them some money.
Thanks.
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 ā¬600 short this month.
- Lets assume half is already covered. Sounds realistic. So ā¬1200/m.
- 14,000 active users. Lets share that:
- ā¬1200 / 14,000 = ā¬0.086
To cover costs each active user would need to pay ~9 cents per month.
Lets imagine the average contributor pays ā¬5/m. 1200/5 = 240 people.
Leaving 13,700 not paying.
i.e., it takes 1.7% of people paying ā¬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 ā¬5 is a good average payment for a month of service.
That'd mean that only 0.85% of users are *actually* paying ā¬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?
@brad I did look into self-hosting a couple years ago. My info is likely way out of date, but at the time... self hosting was complicated, it didn't scale well if you had chunky follow lists, it nerfed a lot of discoverability and spam/community moderation stuff, and it would be an ongoing ball-ache to administer.
Then mastohost turned up but I'd already decided on being here. Someone else managing removes much of the technical admin ball-ache, but not the rest.
As for cost... not sure tbh
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.
@mattwilcox The image is a screenshot of an announcement post on a social media platform. The background is dark gray, and the text is primarily white with some links in purple. The post is titled "Announcement" in white text at the top. The content of the post is as follows:
"In 9 days new bills arrive for the servers, media storage and emails send. At this moment I am still a massive 660 euros short for this month (estimate). If you can and would like to help me out in paying these bills you can so via:"
The post then lists several donation links:
At the bottom of the post, there is a thumbs-up icon with the number "1" next to it, indicating one like, and a smiley face icon.
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š± Energy used: 0.217 Wh
@mattwilcox Adding my two cents here as someone who runs an instance. I don't think most folks realize how much of a hog on resources running Mastodon ends up being and how expensive it is to keep afloat. A basic server requires elasticsearch, redis, nginx, and PostgreSQL, not to mention whatever monitoring you might have put in place to make sure you're made aware of server issues.
My instance is SUPER tiny, I've got all of 8 people on it and only 4 of them are active and my Linode VM is barely hanging on at 8 GB of memory and 4 vCPU. If you're on a popular instance, the bill to keep everything humming is going to be high. So folks who are putting out requests like this, they're not exaggerating those numbers, it costs a lot of money to keep a popular Mastodon instance running.
@JustinDerrick @mattwilcox Yep, 100%! This is a drastic oversimplification but looking at what eats up memory and CPU on my server, the mastodon technology stack uses multiple services that work better the more resources you throw at them. Redis for instance can run on as little as 256 MB of memory and for small implementations, it's generally more than adequate. If you don't tune it though, Redis will basically say "Oh hey, this memory over here is free and I'm allowed to use up to 80% so I'm going to do just that."
Even though my instance only has 8 users, their interactions, who they follow, who those followers boost, etc. *also* plays in to the footprint as the server doesn't just store the data for its own users but the data on anyone that user has interacted with and that creates a massive footprint. For example, no one on my instance has shared any media files for about a week, yet the cached media on my server at this time is a little over 100 GB. That's because even though no one on my instance shared anything, they follow people who do, and that all gets cached locally.
So the distributed nature of the fediverse ends up being a double-edged sword.
@mattwilcox if you use ANY fediverse service.....
They are almost always run by kind-hearted volunteers, usually subsiding the running costs heavily
@mattwilcox I commend people who operate Mastodon servers as much as anyone else.
But if an individual-run instance with 14.000 people is basically in the red every single month, then this is not a sustainable way of running a Mastodon instance.
There is a systemic issue that needs to be resolved ... not begging users to help every month.
@mattwilcox The point is that if a hobby causes economic hardship every month, one should probably get a different hobby.
It sucks, yes, but there has to be some reflection about "is my hobbyārelative to my incomeāviable?" before the hosters pull the plug due to unpaid bills.
@mattwilcox
> You're acting as though the issue is the person wanting to
> build and foster a community for not _giving enough_
If you think this, then you probably should read the things I wrote more carefully.
@not3ottersinacoat No one is being guilted here. People are being asked to consider their use of a service and whether they can contribute.
The numbers are plain: the vast majority simply use and do not contribute. And the vast majority *could contribute*.
This isn't about the minority that can't, it's about the majority who don't and could.
@mattwilcox @not3ottersinacoat @soc Sorry for tapping in.. 
There's a little two sides of this, I very much feel ashamed for asking these donations and would love to just pay it all myself and dont bother you all.. But.. with the current size of most of the services i run, it's a little too much at this point for me to pay alone. At this point servers costs about 4-5 times our home rent so.. yeah
@mattwilcox @not3ottersinacoat ā¤ļø I do always try to put the tone on "if you can donate" and not forcing in any way 
It kinda breaks my hearts when people say something like "sorry i cant do more"! Never apoligize for helping out, every bit helps 
@stux My point of contention is that nice people doing tons of work and literally funding what other people use with cold hard cash... end up feeling bad about asking the gigantic majority who are simply using their work to *consider* paying towards that work.
This is the fediverse. There are plenty of people who grok the technical effort needed, and open source economics, and have no issues buying $6 coffees on the morning routine.
"Sacrifice" a coffee once a month.
Done ā¦
@mattwilcox I wish I could, I'm just a minimum wage employee with my own overheads.
I set my account to auto-delete after 2 weeks to mitigate servers having to store unnecessary data though.
@mattwilcox I kind of assumed you meant about others anyway, just saying that some of us want to.
I checked my accounts and had a few quid I forgot about in the paypal so sent a couple. Hopefully it goes towards it all!
@mattwilcox IMHO that's one of the good things of Mastodon and decentralization itself: it allow for splitting costs between everyone instead of one big instance having to receive a lot of donations or having incentives to switch to being supported by companies (like ads and/or AI companies).
It's also friendly for people with financial needs: a platform that requires everyone to pay might workaround that, but then just those that can pay that fee would join. If someone is struggling financially, don't get pressured to help their instance using their own money, try other means instead, like, boosting posts asking for donations and promoting responsibility among users, mainly those new to the platform. We are a community, not products for advertisers to enjoy, we should help each other.
I had been making random donations every year, but I just signed up to my instance's contribution page at $9/month. 30 cents per day seems kinda cheapskate when I think of it like that.
Greg Egan
Jan Wildeboer š·
Matt Wilcox
Thomas Wouters
Andy Baio
jacobian
Brad Bell
Linda Rose Smit
Steve Gisselbrecht
Altbot
Noah
Tom
Malwen
nicky
drpatois
Justin Derrick
ts š
javensbukan
David - Forking Mad
soc
Emma Liv šØš¦
stuxā”
TomWilsonYEG
kosure
xyla š not gpn
XaetaCore 
The Tired Horizon
Gustavo
Network == Abstraction Layer
Evo Terra is hopeful š„¹šŗšø
My camera shoots fascists
Ren