The big tech news today has been that X (formerly Twitter, as everyone says) is raising the price of its Premium Plus subscription by almost 40%. I haven’t been using Twitter, or X, for two years now, so this is not particularly interesting to me, but I saw comments, and have also seen people say this in the past, that the fediverse is free.
Free as in beer? Now hold on for a second. There are nearly 30,000 fediverse servers, and a big portion of those, by number of active users, are running Mastodon, which can be cheap, but also pretty expensive.
And because I love the fediverse, and data, I decided to ask the community to see what the total bill is.
I'm curious, how much does it cost you, monthly, on average, to participate in the fediverse?
Including voluntary donations to your server admins, fediverse apps and other software, your own server, etc. Any money you spend directly towards keeping the fediverse going.
A follow-up poll. Where does your money go?
UPDATE 2024/12/27: Jon from The Nexus Privacy did the math, and it adds up to $5.5 million/month!
Note that the poll only looks at the monetary costs associated with running the various servers and services, and does not take into account non-monetary costs and contributions.
Fediverse continues to be an interesting, fun, challenging, and equally exciting and heartbreaking group project, with so many of us actively contributing to it.