Should I launch a fediverse instance capable of supporting 10-50k users (or more) with a crowdfunding model for full time technical and moderation staff?
Some context:
I'm an SRE at a medium sized company, and I've been a linux sysadmin for my entire professional life.
I know, more or less, exactly what I need to know to build an instance that can scale to dozens of thousands of users.
I know how to do it cheaply enough that it would be reasonable to crowdfund, and I have enough experience with community building and moderation to build a team who could do that effectively (with which I wouldn't be directly involved, because I have an itchy ban finger.)
We'd do it all on the up and up.
I am conflicted about this, because I firmly believe we should have 1,000 10 user instances, rather than 10 1,000 user instances or 1 10,000 user instance, but ...
I could use it to train people on SRE best practices, we could provide a digital home for a new community.
Openning a big instance
Alright, more context:
We're setting up a small server farm (probably starting with a single rack, but maybe more) locally.
We're also leasing a few large servers in Europe.
We're going to run hometown. (https://runyourown.social/) and we'll have open signups with approval (I think that's what it's called. We have to manually activate accounts.)
We've specced out the hardware to support a few thousand users, and we're deploying our infra such that it's easy to scale, move things around, grow, etc.
Part of the hardware we're building will provide additional storage for a few instances we already run, and some overflow disk space for my peertube instances.
We'll probably also start a (paid) peertube instance.
I have four people with experience managing online communities who are already on board to help moderate. I have two people who have experience managing infrastructure for million+ user applications on board to get the thing up and running and to keep it going.
Openning a big instance
We'll operate on a tip jar, and keep those financials publicly disclosed. We'll offer some extra stuff at higher payment levels ($5/month for a peertube account, perhaps? I dunno. We're still working out the details.)
The number of users we will support will be directly tied to our current financials. Anyone who is a paying supporter will get an account. Signups will be open to others until we come close to saturating existing resources, and then will be closed to non-paying accounts unless/until we can afford additional moderators/hardware/etc.
Once hosting costs are covered, any additional income will be split between:
- The developer of hometown @darius because that's the ethical thing to do in this situation.
- Our moderators, because they do most of the real work
- Our sysadmins, because being on call sucks.
And a little will be carved off to go towards additional hardware and expansion.
We'll probably also offer (paid) hosting to existing admins or people who are interested for a fixed fee, but in a case by case way, not a This is a Service we offer way.
Openning a big instance
If this sounds like the kind of thing you want to take part in, let me know!
We haven't set anything up to take payments yet. We're still working out all the details of the legal organizational structure of the instance, but we'll get there.
re: Openning a big instance
@ajroach42 I feel like the most important question isn't addressed here: how do you prevent this from becoming another mastodon.social-esque poorly-moderated general server?
The real scaling problem is in dealing with people, not with servers, and if there's not even a unifying factor in terms of interest/politics/etc. among the users, I don't see how it could ever be moderated effectively, even with paid mods.
re: Openning a big instance
>if there's not even a unifying factor in terms of interest/politics/etc. among the users, I don't see how it could ever be moderated effectively, even with paid mods.
... That's a really weird take.
How would adding a common interest make moderation easier?
re: Openning a big instance
@ajroach42 Because people are looking for community, people who they feel safe with and who they feel understand their life and experiences.
re: Openning a big instance
@ajroach42 Yes, but that's not the problem I'm alluding to - the problem I'm talking about is much more fundamental.
Put 50k people with nothing in common in a room, and you *will* have fights break out. What makes moderation and selective federation work on fedi is that each instance is themed around something that people have in common, that people can reliably find agreement on.
This is why basically every "general" instance turns into a moderation nightmare of some sort; you very quickly run into irreconcilable differences, and eventually you will get fediblocked for the worst of your instance population.
re: Openning a big instance
@joepie91 Ah. I don't foresee that being as much of a problem as it has been elsewhere, because the folks who will be running and moderating this place are pretty strongly opinionated about what we'll accept, and aligned in that respect.
Sure, it'll be a "general" instance, but it'll be a general instance mostly run by a bunch of queer intersectional feminists with loud politics and shared values.
I've never moderated a community of 50k, and this place won't get to 50k super quickly, but I've run a couple of large orgs, and some of the folks I'm working with have moderated communities of 10s of thousands of people or more.
People will fight, that's the way of it.
M.S is a trashfire because it's too big, has too little moderation, and is run by a dude who does not actually want this to be a healthy and productive space. I'm trying to do something better.
Are you saying that I shouldn't?
re: Openning a big instance
@joepie91 We have a moderation team, and open up signups to the level that can be supported by our moderation team, based on our current funding.
I thought I'd made that clear in the thread, did I not?