On Not Contributing Money to Fediverse Instances

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Fediverse instances want you to pay them to use their services. This could be fantastic. It isn’t, for one simple reason. We are helping someone else grow their projects enough for them, eventually to get IPOs and sell off the company, and our contribution to the highest bidder for them to profit.

Zwift and Strava

I liked Zwift and I liked Strava, until they raised venture funds, getting millions, on top of what we were already paying for the service. When Strava got VC funding I stopped my subscription because shareholders now control the company, not the company, and shareholders have no vested interest in users, as demonstrated by Twitter being sold to Musk.

Reported Bugs that were never fixed

Zwift also got millions invested into their product but I stopped using them because:

• my setup didn’t work well with zwift

• When I reported the issue they just asked “Did you try reinstalling everything?” At the time Zwift cost 240 per year to use. It would have cost a further 300 or more francs to get a new indoor trainer and accessories. In the end you’re spending 500CHF per year to cycle indoors. For a little more you get a gym membership with plenty of machines. In fact, for that cost you get a gym membership to the Swiss 24hr gym. I forgot the name

The Fediverse

I contributed to two or three instances on the Fediverse but one of them kept going down, not for minutes, but hours, or even days at a time. The uptime that I was paying for was wasted on a project that should have been in alpha or beta, rather than production.

I have no issue with people trying things, their service going down, and then trying something else, and going down again. What I had an issue with was the people saying “sorry” without meaning it. In the end I deleted my account and stopped contributing the symbolic sum

Self-Hosting

It sounds as if I don’t believe in paying for services, but that is not the case. The Fediverse is a decentralised network or networks. It doesn’t matter whether you’re on an instance with three hundred people, or three people. Me, myself, and I.

With Masto.host you can setup an account for you and your family, or your company, or a larger group of people. You don’t need to rely on someone you don’t know to keep the site funded and running. You can keep full control. If you decide to upgrade you can, and if you decide to destroy the instance you can. You can also back everything up, regularly.

Learning

By having my own Fediverse instance I get to play with the admin panel. I get to choose which hashtags I see, and which I don’t. I get to choose whether the default is light, or dark, and more. I get to play around. I also get to build my network, rather than join a pre-determined one, as I would on indieweb.social, mastodon.social or others. I also get to see which instances are most active

Limitations

When I created an instance I wanted to give myself a character limit of 1000 characters. I see that I can’t do that with the hosting I have now. I would like to have more control, but to do that I need to setup my own instance from scratch and that could be more expensive.

I am experimenting with a Raspberry pi. My goal is to get mastodon up and running locally, before experimenting with Azure, AWS or some other cloud hosting solution. After that I can see about setting up my own instance from scratch, online.

And Finally

The more people you have on an instance, the cheaper it gets. On Masto.host a hundred person server instance costs twenty USD, compared to 6 USD for an instance with from one to five people. For two thousand people you would spend ninety USD per month.

If you’re wondering why I don’t mention ActivityPub for WordPress and ClassicPress it’s because I am disappointed in them. They made a big fuss about reaching version 1.0.0 but two way interactions between the Fediverse and WordPress/ClassicPress are still basic, and one way. It was promising, but I feel that it is now stagnating. The day it allows full two way communication I will be happy.

While WordPress and ClassicPress communicate one way with mastodon they are less relevant than when they communicate two ways, because at that point conversations will flow.