Saw some people on mastodon making fun of cohost for "needing 46k a month to host 12k users" and wow that left a bad taste in my mouth. People will seriously say you need to pay your workers a living wage and then turn around and mock a business that is actually doing that for not being sustainable.
Then of course there were a bunch of armchair quarterbacks who were like "well I spend 75 bucks per 250 users, even if I add two mods with low wages I only get up to 12k a month"
My dude. It's the "low wages" part that's the problem there. And what about yourself? What are you living off of while working fulltime on this? What about the other engineers that you will need on a project of this scope and complexity? What about legal and financial service fees? What about equipment costs? What about payroll? What about any of several dozen things that adds overhead to a business that you're conveniently ignoring in your back of the napkin math?
It's just the perfect intersection of bad leftist praxis and having no fucking clue how hard it is to keep any business alive to greatly upset me.
i saw this toot (and a couple others) too and thought it was either poorly considered at best, or bad faith at worst, but i'm not really interested in coposting about that - anything that needs to be said has already been said, and dragging it further would just be sort-of dunkposting on a thing that didn't even happen here
the thing i kind of want to dig at here is the assumption the post seems to start with, that seems to be something along the lines that all of these sites and services are interchangeable and that cohost could/should have simply been another mastodon instance. i find this to be a common thread or opinion on that network, "X should have been fediverse" and that's the angle i want to challenge specifically
we are, overall, generally better off having a more diverse ecosystem of services running on a plurality of platforms with different goals and methods. there's no shortage of mastodon instances - what would one more buy us that isn't already there?
there is certainly value in a volunteer run, decentralized social media network, but some recent internet Fun™ has demonstrated that there are downsides to relying on volunteer labour (albeit those have largely come with baggage - specifically in the form of capitalism profiting from said unpaid volunteer labour)
this place aims to demonstrate that the website model which sells its users as the product in exchange for a free service - which, it's worth noting, seems to be fraying at the edges as VC confidence wanes - is not the only viable model, and that an ethically managed site with an equitable team who are paid well can succeed, and that's a model worth interrogating
i wish we didn't see quite as much tribalism, self-assurance that "my model is the best model," and just kind of broad spectrum animosity between sites that doesn't need to be there
that said, i've been pretty disappointed to see the tone taken on masodon over the cohost financials update - feels like people are almost happy to see the site struggle. i may not personally vibe with my experience on masto very much, but i don't think we need to be enemies at each other's throats for no reason

