ann-arcana

Queen of Burgers 🍔

Writer, game designer, engineer, bisexual tranthing, FFXIV addict

OC: Anna Verde - Primal/Excalibur, Empyreum W12 P14

Mare: E6M76HDMVU
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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.


eramdam
@eramdam

And don't even get me started on those making fun of "wah they're so dumb for paying Fastly for a CDN, they should instead use Cloudflare for free but they left Cloudflare for Ethics Reasons, how stupid".

Yeah, how stupid of the cohost staff to have a spine and not wanting to give money to Cloudflare who proudly hosted nazis and transphobes, geez. Fedi, man.


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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)

in reply to @eramdam's post:

eh many of the posts aren't "can't tell the difference", they're explicitly preaching the advantage of being hobbyist, which… i think is kinda fair in a sense? but it's not like hobbyist services are free from sustainability issues either, of course

The "I can just underpay someone to moderate it it's not that expensive" mindset coming from people who claim to be leftists and talk about how hard running a community is is fucking wild