September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations
The latest blog post about our .world and the Fedihosting Foundation. As you can read in the blog, the donations are no longer covering our running costs. If you are able to spare a few Euro's or dollars or whatever currency, please check the list of our donation platforms in the blog.
Edit: I will add these to the blog: https://bunq.me/fhf (for EU bank transfers) https://github.com/sponsors/Fedihosting-Foundation (Github Sponsor)
https://blog.mastodon.world/september-2025-updates-for-the-worlds-and-call-for-donationsOpen linkView original on lemmy.world490
Comments122
I get the feeling.
I put in 10€ for you, now you don't have to feel bad :)
I’m trying to understand who (and where) to donate to here.
The blog post talks about various costs for the Worlds communities - the highest of which is server costs, and one line item is for “Monthly contribution to the FHF”. Then below, the donation links say “As a reminder, you can donate to FHF here”. So are those links for donating only to FHF? The Patreon link goes to “Mastodon.world (Fedihosting Foundation)”.
Some clarity here would be helpful so it’s easy for folks to understand who needs donations and where they can help with that.
The FHF is the foundation owning all instances (https://fedihosting.foundation/hosted/). So the costs are for running all the .world instances. The contribution to FHF is the costs for running the non-profit foundation itself.
The Patreon was setup when mastodon.world was the only instance... haven't renamed it yet.
The spamming troll made me realize, we don't have any sort of posting limits? Limiting contributions to something humanly possible, like say, one every thirty seconds, would help cut down on that stuff. Maybe could base it on IP address, so multiple accounts couldn't be used to partially get around it?
Most people would never even realize the limit is there.
Lemmy lacks essentially all mature moderation and administration controls a forum/social media platform would need to survive the broader internet back in 2014. Nevermind 2025.
It's quite unfortunate.
The only savings grace is how small Lemmy is, it's exposure is incredibly narrow right now.
Fediverse software in general tends to not be that performance friendly either. Leading to extreme hosting costs to scale up to even a meager number of users.and then fans out some level of duplicate resource requirements to federated instances.
Linearly, if lemmy.world (~15k MAU) was the size of reddit (~400mill MAU, being very conservative). It would cost ~$14,000,000/m in compute. Of course, the real number would be much higher due to scale ability complexities/technology. But either way that's a lot of $$$.
Anyways, not to be a Debby downer, it's just hard not to feel defeated by some of these things. And the tasks to make things better are massive.
Things are always getting better of course.
I had a look around the code a while ago, and not only is it lacking in moderation and administration, it's also very much lacking in the distributed computing department.
It's essentially set up in a way that all instances store close to all of the data and that with more instances the traffic and compute costs also scale terribly that way.
Lemmy is pretty close to the limit of its technical capacity.
I wish they had set Lemmy up as a bunch of basically phpBB forums with federated single-sign-on and frontend that can access the backend of all the separate forums transparently. That way each instance would have to only moderate, store and serve their own content instead of multiplying all the work for each instance.
Case in point: The €1950/month that the .worlds cost is close to €1 per active user per month. That's a crazy amount.
For a phpBB forum with ~2000 active users you'd expect to pay maybe €50 per month.
That doesn't seem right. There are some 37,000 active Lemmy accounts within the past month.
https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/stats&months=6
It's well-known that lemmy.world is the biggest instance (or close to it). In addition, there are hundreds of thousands of Mastodon users, of which at least a good few per cent are mastodon.world users.
This would give the Fedihosting Foundation a user count on the order of 10^4^ users. And since their hosting cards are on the order of 10^3^ EUR, this would mean each user costs on the order of 10^-1^ EUR.
For comparison, Reddit reported 10^8^ daily active users. They also reported cost of revenue at 46 million USD per quarter, meaning they spent on the order of 10^7^ USD per month. So their cost per user is 10^7^ USD divided by 10^8^ users, or 10^-1^ USD.
https://investor.redditinc.com/news-events/news-releases/news-details/2025/Reddit-Announces-Second-Quarter-2025-Results/default.aspx
This seems to show that Reddit and Lemmy cost on the same order of magnitude to operate (which, keep in mind, can still mean a 2x or 3x cost difference).
You are right, must have misclicked somewhere for the lemmy.world stats. Here are the real ones: https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/lemmy.world
15472 monthly active users.
But your Reddit numbers are off by quite some margin. First, you are comparing Reddit's daily active users to lemmy.world's monthly active users. Reddit has 10^9 monthly active users (1.21 billion, to be exact).
Also, the ~€2000 for lemmy.world are pure hosting costs (except of €153 for donations), but for Reddit you included their whole revenue. That's not even their costs, that's their income.
I dug through their Earnings press release, and also there they don't specifically talk about their hosting costs. The closest I could find was "General and administrative" costs, which is what's left over of their total costs if you don't take "Cost of revenue", R&D and marketing into consideration, and that's $68.8 million per quarter (~$32 million per month), so 10^7, and that includes salaries and all sorts of other expenses down to the rent of the offices, the PCs their staff use and even the toilet paper. Hosting costs are at best a few percent of that figure, likely much less. So I'd knock that down to 10^6, likely even 10^5
That would give us $10^-4 to $10^-2 (if all administrative costs are purely hosting costs) per user. That's about the difference between paying €2000 to host a Lemmy instance with 15k monthly active users and €50 for hosting a phpBB instance to do the same.
The 1700/mo is for all instances we host, with around 30k active users/mo. (If every active user would pay 1 euro per year, it would cover the costs) But it can't be compared to Reddit. Reddit has employees. Employees cost more than infra. If I would pay myself and all the volunteers for the work we put in, the cost would be at least 10 times what it is now.
The "cost of revenue" is the figure that I am using. In business, cost of revenue is defined as the costs incurred directly to deliver the product to the customer, which is basically just hosting fees.
Thus I believe 10^7^ USD is correct.
So the difference is about one order of magnitude, which is still not insignificant.
Although, it would not surprise me if Reddit makes up most of that order of magnitude in terms of economy of scale, since at some point you would just rent some warehouses and run your own server farms, or at least negotiate better hosting rates if you're spending millions on hosting every month.
we do have some limits in place, but lemmy only allows rate limits per ip, and those are counted in each backend process independently. I'm currently working on implementing better rate limits in our load balancer.
due to rate limits historically not working at all or not working properly, there are still various instances without decent limits. additionally, these rare limits only apply to local users. federated activities are not limited within lemmy. we recent added some fairly high limits to our automod to catch some of these cases and it's been working alright so far.
Wouldn't it be an idea to enable auto-deletion of messages after a set amount of time?
what would that have to do with this?
Would it not reduce the storage needed, and so too hosting costs? Granted I don't know well how that works, but it was just an idea.
you could save some storage with this, but i don't think it's a good idea. a lot of people expect the threadiverse to have a lot more permanence than e.g. mastodon, similar to reddit. being able to find old posts/comments about a certain topic is one of the things that made reddit as useful as it used to be, especially when searching for tech related issues in my experience. old doesn't necessarily mean obsolete, and whether this would be suitable would be highly dependent on the community. most communities are not intended to be for ephemeral content only.
Hmm, fair point. How about making it an option for communities? That they can enable/disable this permanency, with the default for new instances being 'off'?
Could have a truthworthiness score that can increase posting limits in the backend.
Perhaps you know, but commenting anyway for those who are new and don't, you can visit anyone's profile and see their modlog and a vibe check. May help inform how genuine someone may be on here.
Where or with what frontend do you see the mod log?
The default and alexandrite works
I've started evaluate all free (as in freedom) services to match my entertainment subscriptions (I.e. netflix) and this ended up being avg 5$/mo min wage for all free services that I use which is very reasonable expense. All things don't even add up to 100$/mo in my case and the value much outweighs that!
Bless be the foss priests 🙏
Can we avoid payment provider middleman fees with EU bank transfers?
https://bunq.me/fhf
Awesome! Monthly recurring transfer set. 💪
The first 4 people who click this link will get a free membership to the fedihosting foundation patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld/redeem/f/E235F16A97
Edit: Downvoting support for the fediverse?
Yeah.. on PieFed.world we can see who downvoted..
Pretty sure you can on Lemmy too as I’ve been banned from a community simply for downvoting something in it.
https://lemvotes.org/
You can search users or copy/paste a link for a post, comment etc.
There are also instances that just show it to all of their users
Ruud is a mod (and admin)
Your comment has really been buried under all that spam. Didn't think I could redeem it 16 hours later. Thanks a lot.
Let‘s gooo!
I was laid off a few months ago, but once I'm up and running again, I'll drop some coin.
In the meantime, I would love to help on a technical level. I have docker experience, but limited and would love to relearn ansible since it has been a few years. Let me know how I can help!
![email protected] proudly offers support. Pikas love grass roots!
Set up a recurring donation. Lemmy and Mastodon are great and I want them to stick around.
I see your preferred donation platform is euro based, do you get good $ to eu exchange? or shoul i go patreon?
Payments are handled by Stripe or Paypal for both platforms so that doesn't matter
I'm really confused by what link donates to who. Can you just give us a simple link that's like "click here to donate to lemmy.world"?
The Bunq link goes directly to the bank account of the organization running Lemmy.world, mastodon.world, and piefed.world.
And you don't need to use bunq's UI to make a transfer from your own bank, just the IBAN (which is revealed after clicking the bunq link)
Question about BUNQ: There's this string that looks like an IBAN (
NL78 BUNQ 2108 3219 85). If I send money using a recurring bank transfer to that, will it work? Will substantial fees be incurred as a result?Yes it will work. And this way there will be no fees.
Oh, fantastic. I'll double my monthly donation. Thanks!
Done.
I have doubled my donation!
Did that make it go up?
Yeah, it did, I donate monthly. Are you doing your part? 🤨
Happy to help, I made a donation.
Hello. Is GitHub sponsor a good way to donate? Do all funds go to Fedihosting? Other link shows currency in Euros but I am in USA and want to donate $
Thanks!
Saved, upvotes and commented to find this post easier
Is the situation changing for you since the post?
Is there a bottom limit for bank transfer, below which they would not be profitable? Can I set up a monthly payment for, for example, 1 or even 0,25€?
Is there a guarantee that none of these donations go to the tankie dev?
Isn’t that a .ml issue, not a .world issue?
Many lemmy communities give money to the devs
Okay, but what if a dev on .world is a tankie? Who can risk their money going towards a functioning community website if there's any chance someone I hate might cover rent and groceries?
they're referring to Lemmy developers, not someone using/running .world
The comment you replied to is sarcastic. We should support tne good work even though some of that support goes to people we don't like personally.
Did you not see the breakdown of where the money goes? These aren't being paid out to these people individually they're not getting paid a salary. They donate their time. All the money goes to the functioning of the Fediverse and .worlds.
I'm assuming that you're referring to the Lemmy developers. FHF supports Lemmy development with a monthly donation of €50, same as we do for Mastodon development.
If it makes you feel better, there are enough other people donating who don't mind some or all of their donation amount going towards Lemmy development to offset your donation not being used for Lemmy development contributions.
It's not worth the effort to set up independent purpose-bound donation pools to separate donations from people unwilling to support certain people/organizations, as the end result would be the same, except a lot more maintenance/accounting overhead. Calculating with the current expenses of €1,700/month, this is less than 3% of the total donations we'd need to cover our bills.
It's not being "split", they give a flat 50 € regardless of whether you donate 0 € to them or 1 million €. In fact if more people donate to .world this will, infact, water down the percentage.
If the organisation had a monthly revenue of 1 000 000 € and gave 50 € to them, this would be such a vanishingly small percentage (0.005%) that it could well be argued to be negligible
What a passive agressive response
It isn't worth donating if my money goes to .ml admins, any amount
It's morally wrong to give money to people who use their platform to spout fascist propaganda
Are they tankies or fascists? Pick one.
Is there a difference? They both support fascist dictatorships.
Yes, there is, otherwise why even use words if they carry no meaning?
What is the difference?
Same lol
Context for those unaware
Tbh, for me idc. Better a tankie than a fascist. And better an ancom than a tankie.
Whichever tankie allies with ancoms to fight the fascist, is my friend.
But, indeed unfortunately, a ton of self-proclaimed tankies actually are fascists.
Meeting in the middle only ever seems to benefit right wingers.
I'm done doing it.
Good point. It's time the dicks meet us in our real middle, not their fake and disingenuous perception of a middle.
I am sorry for being poor
E: I have donated 2 euro
Y'all do great work. Best of luck on the donations!
Donated. Hope to see the project continue well into the future.
Why are users going down? Is the fediverse in danger?
afaik the decrease in users has mostly been on mastodon.world, where the suspected reason is to a large degree requiring registration applications to prevent spam bots. this seems to scare off a lot of users unfortunately. i'm not involved in the mastodon stuff, but afaik there is currently no system similar to what we have on lemmy or piefed to automatically accept applications after certain checks were successful.
In total the fediverse is stable or slightly growing. ActivityPub is how fediverse instances exchang information. More and more platforms are getting stood up and there are also a bunch of instances of those platforms.
Platforms are things like Friendica, Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, Funkwhale, Hubzilla, Misskey, and now Pifed. Instances are things like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
This approach was intentional. No single platform or service controls everything and if someone starts misbehaving it's easy enough to go elsewhere.
That's not to say there aren't downaides. We have a ton of communities for similar topics on different instances and/or platforms. Each of these communities need to be moderated, have an active user base, etc.
What CMS do you use for the blog page?
I'm not able to help out as volunteer at the moment since I just started with a new job, but might be able to help some time later. I've donated something for the "various small resources" and will be increasing my monthly donation amount.
Unfortunately I just had emergency gallbladder surgery after spending my entire summer out of work and thinking I was dying. I have nothing to give right now.
There you go. But I really wonder why ko-fi needs e-mail. Had to go rummage around for the mail associated with this account. Almost stopped me from donating.
Bare minimum KYC (know your customer) to pay lip service to the idea of preventing money laundering. This will be the case for all payment service providers. If you're in the EU, a bank transfer is trivial and avoids middleman fees.
the ai thing doesnt work for me since the update. Help?
Proposal: add custom animations in posts, let people pay for it. EDIT: like, dumb silly dancing frogs flying around the screen when opening some thread
Despite the spamming, the banned guy's comment is right.
Not giving a cent to censorship and genocide collaborators.
I mean, I get being reluctant to donate or not being able to, but using a software someone worked to develop and a platform someone pays to maintain AND acting high and mighty about it (on that very platform) is rich. The entitlement on some of you people is staggering, I swear.
Then why not also refrain from commenting?
I'm against genocide and anyone who thinks they can stop me from talking about it can go fuck themselves, that's why.
I'm not allowed to criticize a platform bcs I use it and don't give it money?
I'm sure nobody that uses anything from Microsoft, Apple, Meta or whatever uses any of their products.
Who's entitled here believing they can tell other people what to do?
Yeah, we won't give a cent to MAGA fascists. They censor everything. Fuck them.
But Lemmy, yes, all it needs.
Sure, give your money to the Blue MAGA
Donate to .world? Let me get riiight on that.
This platform needs more political and thought diversity, as of now it's far-left only. I will donate when rational discussion happens without promoting political violence.