2026-03-11 The cost of social media
===================================

I recently found a post by Rudy Fraser, founder and CEO of Blacksky.
Blacksky is social media using the AT protocol, like Blueksky.

He said:

> We run a full AppView + PDS + Relay for $1,772/mo. PDS is cheap (
> $0.03/user/mo, 4 VCPUs, 32GB RAM). AppView is the expensive part;
> indexes the entire network (16TB DB), not just your users. Storage
> scales linearly with network activity. PDS scales linearly with your
> account count. – Rudy wants revolution. @rude1.blacksky.team

The nearly $1800/month means a bit more than $20,000 per year. In a
follow-up post, Rudy added that this was for about 800 daily active
users (DAU).

Emelia Smith made a comparison to Hachyderm.io, a large Mastodon
instance on the fediverse. It uses the ActivityPub protocol, like
many other compatible instances. She said:

> ‪That's about the same annual cost as the Hachyderm.io mastodon
> server, based on their published financial reports. -- ‪Emelia‬
> ‪@thisismissem.social‬

She also referred to the Nivenly 2024 financial report:

> Please note that Nivenly transferred expense liability from Kris
> Nova to the Foundation in July of 2023. The sharp year over year
> increase in expenses is due to this fact. When normalized for this
> fact, expenses are up slightly (~10-12%) due primarily to normal
> growth in storage and resilience for Hachyderm.

+-------+------------------+
| YEAR  |  TOTAL EXPENSES  |
+-------+------------------+
| 2023* | $(19,782.63) USD |
|  2024 | $(32,667.59) USD |
+-------+------------------+
>
> -- Nivenly's 2024 Financial Report

Later, @thisismissem@hachyderm.io contacted @esk@hachyderm.io, who
provided some numbers for 2025:

> we are just under $28k for the year. main drivers:

* more edge/CDN nodes & PoPs (we self-host these, no cloudflare-likes)
  -- both for geodiversity + regional resilience

* fully built out dev environment that looks like production (incl
  primary/failover dbs, multiple edge nodes, redises, etc.)

going into 2026 cloud provide price increases will def hit us, seeing
some providers push significant increases, esp on VMs.

MAU ~8k as emelia mentioned, and i don't have any queries for DAU.

I'm not sure how the 8000 monthly active users (MAU) compare to the
800 daily active users (DAU). Perhaps a ratio of 10:1 is reasonable?

Either way, it seems to me that Blacksky is very expensive to set up
and run, but popular Mastodon instances are also very expensive to set
up and run.

In the fediverse, at least, there's a low-cost way to ramp up starting
with single user instances. I've tried the Mastodon alternatives
Pleroma, Snac and GoToSocial on a cheap virtual machine for about
€15/month or about €180/year. I'm currently running GoToSocial but
this virtual machine runs more than just GoToSocial, so let's say the
fedi aspect it's worth a third of this machine or about €60/year (and
all the admin work is done for free, haha).

The way I read Rudy Fraser's comment, it seems to me that a lot of the
cost is the index which depends on the already existing data out
there, irrespective of how big or small your setup is. Thus, there is
absolutely no way to have a small-scale setup.

@galaxis@mastodon.infra.de also offered the following numbers for a
medium size instance:

> We're running freiburg.social with (according to Mastodon) 480 MAU
> on VMs for around €30/month, if I remember correctly. This is
> admittedly a very barebones operation with zero scaleout - I think
> we'll need to offload media storage first, at some point. Our DB is
> 160GB after five years of operation, with mostly linear growth.
> We're using registration approval, so new users trickle in slowly,
> which helps keeping things manageable up to now.

So much smaller than Hachyderm and much cheaper, too. In fact, they
are about six times more expensive than my single-user instance -- for
480 monthly active users!

⁂

For more information about Blacksky:

> Built on the AT Protocol Blacksky provides everything communities
> need in one integrated platform: scalable hosting, custom
> algorithmic feeds, democratic governance tools, resource pooling
> systems, and personal data servers. Communities of all
> kinds—developers, activists, artists—can launch their own social
> networks with the click of a button, creating safe, independent
> spaces free from algorithmic suppression and corporate oversight. --
> Backsky Algorithms, Overview
>
> Blacksky Algorithms builds open-source, community-driven
> infrastructure for decentralized social media. Our mission is to
> empower communities with tools for safety, governance, and control
> over their online spaces. This documentation is designed to help new
> users understand what Blacksky offers and how to get started with
> our feeds and moderation services. -- Blacksky Documentation,
> Introduction

I really appreciate the effort Blacksky is going through to establish
an alternative to Bluesky. I really hope they manage to do this in the
long run without surveillance ads. Right now, when looking at it all,
I am mostly shocked by the size of it all, but when I start digging
deeper and see the costs of large instances on the fediverse, I'm
similarly shocked.

#Social_Media