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.
The One Weird Trick to cutting costs on your project is to rely on the un/under-paid labor of the peripheralized, and then burn them when their value:disposability index reaches a certain point. You see this a lot with "decentralized" efforts, especially, where the "costs" are basically just bargain-basement image hosting and some VM space or whatever.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the big takeaway from Something Awful as a formative piece of internet culture, as well as the success of developing volunteer-fueled FOSS frameworks that are then either hawked to or consumed by what everyone seems to have taken to calling "corpos" to seem counterculture. It's not that you need a professional organization managing shit, but that you can just chew everyone up and spit them out when you get to the gristle, and be smug about coming out on "top." This is part of why I tend to make the argument that labor organization and formalized contracts are more important than feeling good about where you work, especially if "good" is some vagary about inclusivity, or the "loving what you do." People need to know their jobs and there needs to be some sort of accounting once you get past, like, running your own chatroom or small, insulated social media project.
PS: I would like to add that people seem to think that internet projects are "cheap" because most startups have had infinite runway to burn. The current incarnation of the internet was built on the largesse of social engineering efforts that pump fake value and, very frequently backed-up sovereign wealth from extractive industries, into things that cannot and will not be profitable, never mind sustainable. It's why the King of Reddit is currently gutting the whole endeavor - he sees Elon Musk's managerial style of Twitter to be aspirational specifically because the last gravy train has been going off the rails lately, and it's all sliding into the online version of necropolitics.
