Cohost shutting down (https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down) is sad but not surprising. Unfortunately.
People saying "I wish media was not like today! I'd gladly pay $N for a nice no-nonsense / no-ads social platform". And then they don't.
@aras you keep saying no when we offer though
@aeva the costs are not a problem for me! But amount of people who can run all the instances and the cost is not a problem for them is probably not large
I'm no datacenter expert but I really feel like the market is wildly distorted.
We pay $160/mo to colo a 1U pizzabox w/ 100mbit internet service 10x slower than the gig I get at home.. And for that gig i pay $60/mo
It doesn't need to cost $700/mo to run a computer.
In order to get the performance of a cheap consumer grade SSD, Amazon charges a monthly cost of 100x that consumer grade SSD's purchase price. Sounds insane but its true, type 1TB and 50k IOPS into calculator.aws
And can't most of mastodon's "slowness" be removed by rewriting the outgoing federation to use nonblocking IO? There's probably never been a gotosocial instance this big, but I suspect if there was, it wouldn't need such an investment in compute capacity .
@forestjohnson @aras As I understand it, part of (the brunt of?) the cost for this service is monitoring, updates, and maintenance of both the OS and application install?
@AngryAnt @aras I was talking about IaaS, just the "hardware" part. My experience from running an IaaS myself has been that once you set it up, it just works and doesn't require constant effort.
The software has no marginal cost, so while its cool that someone out there can support themselves financially by facilitating the monitoring and upgrades and stuff, they are gonna be really easy to compete with, and as the market grows, the amount they'll be able to bill should approach zero.
We dont shell out $100s per month to someone who's supposed to update our web browser for us... And the web browser is extremely much more complicated than some dinky little server software like mastodon.
