Mind you, 10k per month per person is actually still less than the actual cost for a professional admin. You can argue whether they really need that many people, but please don't question "the math". It starts to look like gaslighting.

[–] splinter@lemm.ee 32 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (6 children)

The previous commenter makes a worthwhile point even if their phrasing isn’t to your liking. 8 people all making 120k per year at 32 hrs/wk seems excessive for a server with less than 10,000 monthly active users.

[–] rglullis@communick.news -4 points 1 day ago (5 children)

In any case, what number do you think is reasonable? A quick search shows that Facebook employs about 65000 people to serve 3 billion users, 46k users per employee. Even if we were to ask the hachyderm team to be as productive as one of the largest corporations in the world, we would still need at least 2 FTEs.

But given that we are asking them to be as productive as a FB employee, it should be fair to pay them as much as Facebook does, so the real cost per employee goes easily to something like $250k/year (Base salary + bonus + overhead).

So, okay, let's cut the number of people by 4 and multiply their cost by ~2. We are now talking about ~$50k/monthly cost. That's still $0.91/user/month, $5.15/active user/month.

The point is, even if "the math" is skewed to make things look "expensive", even a more conservative estimate has (a) costs per user in the same order of magnitude and (b) cost of labor absolutely dominating over cost of hardware/hosting.

[–] splinter@lemm.ee 14 points 23 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

I don’t know that your comparison to Facebook holds water. Firstly, Meta’s employees are spread over three divisions: Apps, Platforms/Infrastructure, and Product Services (ads, strategy etc), where Facebook itself is just one part of the Apps division. Even assuming that Facebook occupies 50% of Meta’s total workforce (likely a massive overestimate), that brings us to around 30k employees for 3billion users, or 100k users per employee. That gives you about 0.5 FTE for your instance.

More importantly though, the job of administering a mastodon instance isn’t really comparable to the job of engineering a social network, so taking a Facebook’s salary or user numbers doesn’t really give us much actionable data. We don’t know how many Meta employees are directly involved in administration of Facebook, or how much they’re compensated.

Ultimately, it’s about what your users are willing to pay. If you can persuade all 10k of your MAUs that $9/month is worth the value they get from your instance, then go ahead. However, I suspect that you’ll be lucky to get even 1/10 of that.

load more comments (4 replies)

load more comments (8 replies)