Based on the metric on the chatmail website, you can run a server for 100k people for roughly $40 per month.
If you charged each user $1 per year like the original Whatsapp business model, you should be making enough profit to cover hosting costs but also the labor cost of maintenance, upkeep, etc.
Do you think that would also be enough to cover costs when people are sending photos and attachments? Also, is this hosting cost including group messaging? Someone said to me just now
Nice⌠Although relays of direct messages have never been expensive anyways, and there has always been free ones including tunneling relays for webrtc etc.
It is hosting and worse; relays for many-to-many that are expensive as f-ck and most probably impossible to make cheap.
Iâm a big fan of transparent and honest business models. Are any chatmail servers trying this paid model with a simple stripe gateway or anything else (bitcoin, monero, etc idk)? How would that work if a user has multiple profiles? What are the privacy implications of it?
any kind of limitation to user-payment would add layers of complexityâŚ
probably the best thing is just to keep spawning chatmail servers and thanks to the multirelay option it would be good if the default server in the app would just be a couple of long time trusted servers
but as every decentralization software, if every local hackerspace would spin an instance and directly ask local people to sign from there would be ââeasierââ
edit: and there is in the work the way to contact people on the server so nudging for donation or doing a yearly campaing would be better
This never worked so far in the past, but maybe you have some secret sauce that you did not explain above.
There existed FOSS service providers
in times with much stronger economy,
with much less global disturbances,
originating from a wealthy country where members are supposed to be able to afford anything,
offering a wide palette of services including email, expensive chat platforms, storage, website, shells and more,
all they requested is a minimum donation of $1/year and even that was possible to be waived away on request if the member was facing temporary hardship.
They still went bankrupt after a couple of years due to a too low amount of active users and high churn.
Iâm also not sure how a chatmail service provide would differentiate themselves from the hundreds of other existing nodes. What could they offer that would make switching to them worthwhile?
Stop asking. Require it. WhatsApp charged $1 per year and millions happily paid it.
An honest and sustainable business model. Which is more than other free providers could offer.
Very true. WhatsApp also had the benefit of integrating the server and client. So the payment was easily handled. Although, payment could be handled through the chat itself. Each provider could operate a delta chat account and payment could just be handlled there in a chat.
i have a private relay that does exactly this via cryptocurrency. people are given a single-use invite link once a transaction confirms. but i donât do this to cover costs. itâs to deter a bit of abuse as the relay is really focused and highly modified. iâm not sure i would recommend this to others running relays, plus i donât think itâs something weâre going to support unless there was enough demand for it.
The beauty of such low costs is the fact that the volunteer network should be large and self maintaining.
In fact, there is no need for this to be theoretical. We are already seeing it now. There are dozens if not hundreds of relays currently. As far as I know, no money has been exchanged.
Using your own calculations, you need one human out of every 10 000 to be willing to give up some time and 48 EUR a month. That is not a big ask, in fact I believe that the current number of relays is about 10x too large vs. total users. For example, I maintain danneskjold.de and I only have 1000 users so far; my boat still has space for another 9000.
If the math continues to work in this way, it will create a truly decentralized network with thousands or hundred of thousands of tiny VPS or at home machines. That is something I can only think of two projects have accomplished : email and Nextcloud (they claim over 5000 servers). If anyone else knows of another please add!
Further existing free federated social protocols with thousands of instances: Fediverse, IPFS, Matrix, XMPP, IRC, phlogs, gemlogs. Some also consider ATP and nostr as such.
Shouldnât it be more like some time + $10 per month? Either way, 48 EUR a month is ~600 EUR a year. Itâs not nothing.
At the risk of repeating myself, charging for usage gives these benefits:
Server admins are incentivized to provide a good service (reliable, good storage amounts, etc)
Server admins are incentivized to not randomly shut down (important because a server randomly dropping is damaging for users even if they have 2 relays linked to their account).
Servers donât get spam sign-ups.
Incentivization via payment helps to deter ulterior motives.
Point #2 is nothing to scoff at. You know the phrase âeasy come, easy goâ? Reliability is valuable.
Yes and a normal person is âcreeped outâ by this. They donât want to use a server from some random guy that they donât know, who has mysterious intentions. Of course, itâs a lot creepier with something like Matrix, XMPP, ActivityPub, etc because these protocols actually hold data that they can read and accounts that they can control. But the point still stands that the intentions are super unclear for the people running chatmail servers for free. Thatâs why people still flock to company-run networks. Clear intentions, clear SLAs and customer agreements, reliability, responsibility, etc.
Honest business models are attractive. Protocols that respect users and give user freedom are attractive. We can have both. Nothing is âfreeâ.
You can do a web search for each alternative. More than 10k operators host Matrix servers which can be found by open crawlers (probably a lot more operate in darkweb mode or even with federation disabled)
I thought we were only talking about federated social communication protocols. âThe webâ itself weakly satisfies this, but it could fit if we restricted it to mean the ensemble of self-hosted blogging engines in the blogosphere (RSSiverse followership and commenters). In general, you may interact with such bloggers (including non-web alternatives such as phloggers, gemloggers and twtxters) using standardized feed formats within a single client in a unified stream not unlike how most people communicate on centralized platforms today.
You wrote 100k users for 40 usd a month.
Thatâs is the same as 10k users for 4 usd a month.
So it would be 12x4 = 48 a YEAR.
I had to push back because that math is what makes all the difference. Not only that but that is precisely what Iâm seeing in terms of costs per user on my own VPS. If anything it could be lower.