Comment on September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoI had a look around the code a while ago, and not only is it lacking in moderation and administration, it’s also very much lacking in the distributed computing department.
It’s essentially set up in a way that all instances store close to all of the data and that with more instances the traffic and compute costs also scale terribly that way.
Lemmy is pretty close to the limit of its technical capacity.
I wish they had set Lemmy up as a bunch of basically phpBB forums with federated single-sign-on and frontend that can access the backend of all the separate forums transparently. That way each instance would have to only moderate, store and serve their own content instead of multiplying all the work for each instance.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That doesn’t seem right. There are some 37,000 active Lemmy accounts within the past month.
lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6
It’s well-known that lemmy.world is the biggest instance (or close to it). In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Mastodon users, of which at least a good few per cent are mastodon.world users.
This would give the Fedihosting Foundation a user count on the order of 10^5 users. And since their hosting cards are on the order of 10^4 EUR, this would mean each user costs on the order of 10^-1^ EUR.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You are right, must have misclicked somewhere for the lemmy.world stats. Here are the real ones: lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.world
15472 monthly active users.
But your Reddit numbers are off by quite some margin. First, you are comparing Reddit’s daily active users to lemmy.world’s monthly active users. Reddit has 10^9 monthly active users (1.21 billion, to be exact).
Also, the ~€2000 for lemmy.world are pure hosting costs (except of €153 for donations), but for Reddit you included their whole revenue. That’s not even their costs, that’s their income.
I dug through their Earnings press release, and also there they don’t specifically talk about their hosting costs. The closest I could find was “General and administrative” costs, which is what’s left over of their total costs if you don’t take “Cost of revenue”, R&D and marketing into consideration, and that’s $68.8 million per quarter (~$32 million per month), so 10^7, and that includes salaries and all sorts of other expenses down to the rent of the offices, the PCs their staff use and even the toilet paper. Hosting costs are at best a few percent of that figure, likely much less. So I’d knock that down to 10^6.
That would give us $10^-3 to $10^-2 (if all administrative costs are purely hosting costs) per user. That’s about the difference between paying €2000 to host a Lemmy instance with 15k monthly active users and €50 for hosting a phpBB instance to do the same.
ruud@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The 1700/mo is for all instances we host, with around 30k active users/mo. (If every active user would pay 1 euro per year, it would cover the costs) But it can’t be compared to Reddit. Reddit has employees. Employees cost more than infra. If I would pay myself and all the volunteers for the work we put in, the cost would be at least 10 times what it is now.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s close to heroic what you are doing, I wasn’t criticising your efforts or your calculation at all. I’m quite sure you shopped around as much as possible to find the best deal for hosting.
I’m just talking about the technology behind it, and sadly when it comes to Lemmy, it’s sometimes quite painfully obvious that the whole system was built by two randos without a background in distributed computing. It’s not exactly efficient.
In a larger corporation it would count as a good prototype, then they’d scrap it and replace it with the real product. Kinda like how Reddit did it, starting out on Python (web.py was built for Reddit, IIRC), and when they gained enough users they scrapped it and rewrote the whole thing using proper distributed computing technologies.
NateNate60@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The “cost of revenue” is the figure that I am using. In business, cost of revenue is defined as the costs incurred directly to deliver the product to the customer, which is basically just hosting fees.
Thus I believe 10^7^ USD is correct.
So the difference is about one order of magnitude, which is still not insignificant.
Although, it would not surprise me if Reddit makes up most of that order of magnitude in terms of economy of scale, since at some point you would just rent some warehouses and run your own server farms, or at least negotiate better hosting rates if you’re spending millions on hosting every month.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Cost of revenue is $45.9 Million per quarter, so ~$15.3 per month. That’s even less than the administrative cost. And again, this certainly includes the salary for everyone working on hosting, and that’s going to be much, much less than the pure cost of hosting.