De Pemig

(If you read this in Mastodon or any other Fedi app, you may click here to read this on my blog)

When I tell people about the Fediverse, I always include the USP of the Fediverse that there are almost no advertisements. There is a simple reason why you don’t and never will see much advertisement in the Fediverse: When a server or platform would annoy their users with advertisement, these users would very quickly move to another place free of advertisement.

This freedom of movement is a result of the interoperability of the different platforms and servers in the Fediverse. It is like with email: if you don’t like Gmail anymore, you simply open a ProtonMail account and tell your contacts that you moved and redirect your Gmail to your ProtonMail.

Having described this, I consistently get the question: But without advertisement, how is the Fediverse paid for?

Underlying this question is the implicit belief that we see advertising in social media so that Meta can offer Facebook and Instagram “for free”. This is a harmful misunderstanding: the gigantic revenue of Big Tech social media platforms has very little relation to the cost of the social network services they provide.

Per Facebook or Instagram user, Meta’s revenue is something like 35 euros per year. That is about 100 billion per year in total. So, that’s what we, the society, pay for Facebook and Instagram. But that is not the cost of the social networking service! By far the largest share of revenue is invested into optimizing advertising through improving the profiling of their users. Aside from that, a large part is spent on making shareholders rich.

I do not know what the actual costs of running Facebook and Instagram are, but I can estimate the costs of running the equivalent in the Fediverse: First, running a server in the Fediverse costs money. For example, a Mastodon server costs about 1 euro per year per account. A PixelFed server (a platform optimized for posting images, like Instagram) may cost about 5 euros per user per year. Second, the free and open software that runs the Fediverse is not /for free/. People invest their time, and governments and NGOs (should) invest money into the development.

So, how is the Fediverse paid for? It’s easy! If every user chips in a donation of 10 euros a year, the server costs are covered. Then, we just take 1% of Meta’s yearly revenue and use that billion to support 10,000 Fediverse developers with 100,000 per year each.

With the remaining 99 Billion per year, we support Ukraine.