I’m trying to blog quicker this year. I’m also sick with the flu. Forgive any mistakes caused by speed, brevity, or fever.

Monday brought two big announcements in the non-traditional (open? open-ish?) social network space, with Mastodon moving towards non-profit governance (asking for $5M in donations this year), and Free Our Feeds launching to do things around ATProto/Bluesky (asking for $30+M in donations).

It’s a little too early to fully understand what either group will do, and this post is not an endorsement of specifics of either group—people, strategies, etc.

Instead, I just want to say: they should be asking for millions.

There’s a lot of commentary like this one floating around:

I don’t mean this post as a critique of Jan or others. (I deliberately haven’t linked to the source, please don’t pile on Jan!) Their implicit question is very well-intentioned. People are used to very scrappy open source projects , so millions of dollars just feels wrong. But yes, millions is what this will take.

What could they do?

I saw a lot of comments this morning that boiled down to “well, people run Mastodon servers for free, what does anyone need millions for”? Putting aside that this ignores that any decently-sized Mastodon server has actual server costs (and great servers like botsin.space shut down regularly in part because of those), and treats the time and emotional trauma of moderation as free… what else could these orgs be doing?

Just off the top of my head:

• Moderation, moderation, moderation, including:
  • moderation tools, which by all accounts are brutally badly needed in Masto and would need to be rebuilt from scratch by FoF. (Donate to IFTAS !)
  • multi-lingual and multi-cultural, so you avoid the Meta trap of having 80% of users outside the US/EU but 80% of moderation in the US/EU.
• Jurisdictionally-distributed servers and staff
  • so that when US VP Musk comes after you, there’s still infrastructure and staff elsewhere
  • and lawyers for this scenario
• Good governance
  • which, yes, again, lawyers, but also management, coordination, etc.
  • (the ongoing WordPress meltdown should be a great reminder that good governance is both important and not free)
• Privacy compliance
  • Mention “GDPR compliance” and “Mastodon” in the same paragraph and lots of lawyers go pale; doing this well would be a fun project for a creative lawyer and motivated engineers, but a very time-consuming one.
  • Bluesky has similar challenges, which get even harder as soon as meaningfully mirrored.

And all that’s just to have the same level of service as currently.

If you actually want to improve the software in any way, well, congratulations: that’s hard for any open source software, and it’s really hard when you are doing open source software with millions of users. You need product managers, UX designers, etc. And those aren’t free. You can get some people at a slight discount if you’re selling them on a vision (especially a pro-democracy, anti-harassment one), but in the long run you either need to pay near-market or you get hammered badly by turnover, lack of relevant experience, etc.

What could that cost, $10?

So with all that in mind, some benchmarks to help frame the discussion. Again, this is not to say that an ATProto- or ActivityPub-based service aimed at achieving Twitter or Instagram-levels of users should necessarily cost exactly this much, but it’s helpful to have some numbers for comparison.

• Wikipedia: ( source )
  • legal: $10.8M in 2023-2024 (and Wikipedia plays legal on easy mode in many respects relative to a social network—no DMs, deliberately factual content, sterling global brand)
  • hosting: $3.4M in 2023-2024 (that’s just hardware/bandwidth, doesn’t include operations personnel)
• Python Package Index
  • $20M/year in bandwidth from Fastly in 2021 ( source ) (packages are big, but so is social media video, which is table stakes for a wide-reaching modern social network)
• Twitter
  • operating expenses, not including staff , of around $2B/year in 2022 ( source )
• Signal
  • $50M/year ( source )
• Content moderation
  • Hard to get useful information on this on a per company basis without a lot more work than I want to do right now, but the overall market is in the billions ( source ).
  • Worth noting that lots of the people leaving Meta properties right now are doing so in part because tens of thousands of content moderators, paid unconscionably low wages , are not enough .

You can handwave all you want about how you don’t like a given non-profit CEO’s salary, or you think you could reduce hosting costs by self-hosting, or what have you. Or you can pushing the high costs onto “volunteers”.

But the bottom line is that if you want there to be a large-scale social network, even “do it as cheap as humanly possible” is millions of costs borne by someone .

What this isn’t

This doesn’t mean “give the proposed new organizations a blank check”. As with any non-profit, there’s danger of over-paying execs, boards being too cozy with execs and not moving them on fast enough, etc. ( Ask me about founder syndrome sometime !) Good governance is important.

This also doesn’t mean I endorse Bluesky’s VC funding; I understand why they feel they need money, but taking that money before the techno-social safeguards they say they want are in place is begging for problems. (And in fact it’s exactly because of that money that I think Free Our Feeds is intriguing—it potentially provides a non-VC source of money to build those safeguards.)

But we have to start with a realistic appraisal of the problem space. That is going to mean some high salaries to bring in talented people to devote themselves to tackling hard, long-term, often thankless problems, and lots of data storage and bandwidth.

And that means, yes, millions of dollars.