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by digitallyfree
1110 days ago
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If we look at this from a technical perspective, what is the cost of running such a service? Something like Facebook obviously costs a lot more to run, as it stores photos and video and also provides each user with an individually generated feed. In contrast HN is rather lightweight and basically serves mostly static cachable content to all users. I believe it was stated somewhere that the entire HN comfortably runs on a 64GB 4/8 bare metal server. On the extreme side I host my personal static web site on my home DSL connection fronted by Cloudflare, as the CDN does all the work and the bandwidth used is minimal. To the people running these new communities the software cost is low as they're based off an open-source service of choice (Lemmy, Mastodon, etc.), and as we saw on Reddit moderation can be done by volunteers. Are the remaining costs for admins, hosting, etc. feasible for a non-profit with some user donations? And can we create more efficient platforms with a plainer style that will minimize the server and electricity costs? |
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90% of costs of places like Facebook are wages and various other expenses that you need too once you are running operation at a similar scale.
E.g. you do need to pay for a large team of lawyers because you are dealing with a ton of copyright takedowns, cease and desists, even lawsuits every single day.
The same with large team of moderators/content reviewers because in many countries people posting illicit content (with the definition of illicit being different by country!) may get your business blocked/shut down in that country. Including seizure of domain, any hw you may there, etc.
Add to that various regulatory compliance (e.g. the the GDPR once you are above certain size), engineers to run and maintain the systems, security team to deal with any attacks that happen 24/7, accountants, secretaries, even janitors and cleaners to keep the offices habitable.
Those are the actual costs. Not your puny server in a closet.