Syntax-Takes

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Mid-20s pastyfaced transfem
manifesting online as a 🦓ZebraDragon🐉
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This user can say it.


eniko
@eniko

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.


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

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


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in reply to @eniko's post:

I think something we have taken for granted since the beginning of internet communities is how we built much of the web on top of volunteerism. It's definitely coming to a head on Reddit right now, but I remember even as late as 2016 when big companies would have volunteers doing the jobs of social media managers for free. So it has become the norm to expect low pay/free work to maintain these spaces. We need to fix that mindset.

Early access is actually a newer term for a method of software development called Lean. The idea is that you are getting in on a product early at its barebones state and you are able to give feedback and influence how the product moves forward. Also, either you get it at a reduced price, get a perpetual license, or some other kind of special discount. I think the biggest problem is that with software packages built on the Lean Method is you're supposed to have 3 or 4 major customers (usually corpos) or a niche user base and its known from the get go that it is a mutual relationship with a barebones piece of software. In games, a lot of expectations are that it's almost a complete product when it usually isn't(and not supposed to be), and it's a much larger userbase than regular software.

the web was built on top of volunteerism because none of this shit actually makes enough money for people to live off

the thing we've taken for granted is expecting professional-quality web applications with impeccable moderation from companies that we might consider maybe possibly paying five bucks a month to if we really want to

It’s honestly mostly payroll, and some other legal etc. fees that largely boil down to “someone else’s payroll”. Hosting fees etc. are not zero but they’re a fairly small chunk of the overall amount.

Computers are cheap. People are expensive.

(Edit: maybe you already realized this and I misinterpreted your post — if so, sorry!)

I try to move on from bad takes, mostly becuz most people like to speak from the back of their heads - automatically without forethought. I'd say 46k a month is a reasonable price for a well curated site, I just hope they can get funding. As flat growth is often looked down upon.

Yeah. Four devs to create and develop a social media site seems pretty reasonable, and salary for four software devs gets you basically to that 46k a month.

If the only way to run a social media site is to get people to work for free, well, it's not great. Maybe that is true.

Theres a lotta unhealthy money garnering ways to stay afloat on the internet, from endless content churn, to premium tiers, to the absolute worst of data harvesting. Cohost has a lot going for in in avoiding that last one.

Even Reddit can't survive forever off of free labor, look where it is now. I will be watching what the devs do carefully, for my own ideas in webdev. 5/46k covered is a long road to go through. Maybe tipping will go a long way towards that, but I think they will need to make a minimum percentile to the site, as it costs money to handle each tip and they could potentially lose on that end.

That's a little over half a million a year, which is, for the record, perfectly reasonable for an in-active-development site with any kind of meaningful traffic. The problem is where that money comes from.

everything considered, i agree this is reasonable.

imagining an alternative timeline though, where they somehow ended up moving to europe before starting assc and cohost... im not sure if my logic applies, but 46k is a higher mid-tier salary over here. in germany you have lucked out if your starting salary is around 30k as a dev right after your apprenticeship... and that is a fine salary over here and nothing to scoff at. of course europe is a bit more civilized in that you would have health and various other insurances already covered (as an employee, i would have to look up how to form a co-op... might be a tiny bit more expensive), also you wouldnt have to commute more than maybe 20km, (thats 12 miles in freedom units)... perhaps even with an retirement plan included.....yadayada

im just wondering how many of the scoffers on mastodon realize that living expenses in europe cannot be compared with those in the states

Fancy Ass Private Medical Insurance that sucks you off or idk whatever it does costs up to about 100 USD/month for one person from what I've heard, so yes lol.

Obligatory insurance that's paid by any legal employer (as self-employed you must pay as part of your tax payment and it's like from 7 USD up depending on income, but after you start paying you should enroll yourself actually to use it which I haven't done lmao) must cover these things (and it's not listed on the page but must cover 100% of trans hormones, in my friends' experience the people working at those insurances like to offer only the 40% that applies to all meds and have to be reminded sometimes with a printout of the law xD).

Public hospitals don't require any insurance either way, they're public (but like in every place on earth that's always somewhat overloaded and stuff, not luxury service)