I asked Jerry about everything. Here is the interview:
$5000 a month sounds a lot for forwarding text messages and images. According to the Fediverse Observer they have 12,000 active users (boils down to $5 per user a year), but still… Is it that much storage or computationally so expensive to federate posts?
I’ve always been surprised by cost numbers mentioned in services and donation requests.
I run my own cheap server which has game servers running in the past, and some other services. I’ve not run any busy services though or fediverse content so I never felt like I could make a reasonable assessment. Just be surprised.
Yes. I also have my own small VPS doing this (Piefed), Peertube, eMail, Nextcloud… for myself and family if they want. And that’s $8 a month. I wonder why it doesn’t scale down drastically with more users. I mean sure they generate a lot of requests. But then you only need to cache an image or pull in the posts and replies once for 12.000 users, while my server does that just for me. (Albeit for Lemmy, which is way smaller than Mastodon).
