if you haven't been keeping score they put out the new financial report that said they're gonna run out of money by next month if they don't get more funding, like, now
@roxy I enjoyed Cohost while it lasted and I loved its layout but yea all too often I felt like I was shouting into a void full FOSS people and IT experts who talked about nothing but code and stuff day in/day out.
I just checked the math on this post, and of the money that they're getting, $95k is going to each employee before anything else is done with it. Barely anything is actually going into the site. I was feeling kinda bad for them, but now that I double checked that math, this feels like a scam - just a fancy way for them to make some free money between jobs and have another bullet point on that resume
and yea, I don't mean $95k total split between the employees. I mean each of them gets $95k a year. Feel free to correct my math if I'm wrong, because I'd love to be wrong about it (because that just sounds unhinged)
@roxy Your math is right, and you’re right that they’re most likely doomed, and you’re right that it’s because they insist on getting paid for their work, but i can’t call that unhinged. $95k is about right as the floor of pay for a software engineer in a risky venture that probably won’t work out. They definitely aren’t doing it for the money; they’d make three times that in base salary alone at apple/google/amazon/microsoft/whatever.
The problem isn’t really with the expenses; you’re contrasting salaries with money going “into the site” (hosting and such), but the ratio is about right, and neither of those are all that large. It’s ultimately just not that expensive to operate a simple website like that. The real problem is in the revenue; they just don’t really make enough money and probably never will. And you can’t really get paid if you don’t make any money.
Mastodon has the same problem, except that the problem is split between a thousand server admins, 997 of whom never expect to get paid.
@gnat Yea, I saw something saying that a mastodon instance can get by on way less, and it's true, but also instance owners are relying on the work of it being an open source project with people all around the world contributing. So, I don't think it's quite the same (I don't mean to say that it costs nothing to run and maintain a mastodon instance, it's just that they don't necessarily have to write much code for it)
@roxy yeah totally. For masto, instance admins and devs donate their labor, and generally speaking the instance admins just pay for server costs without reimbursement (except for a few almost-breaking-even instances with patreons; rip to cybre.space).
You can make just about any sort of model work if you have a bunch of people willing to donate stuff or work for free / dramatically reduced wages!
And fwiw cohost seems to be paid for on the whims of a single rich weirdo; as a single-rich-weirdo-funded project it’s honestly absurdly manageable. $500k loss a year? A single rich weirdo was paying Rod Dreher that much to write for the American Conservative for like a decade or whatever. A fun lil website is way better than a hundred articles about The Transgenders or whatever else rich weirdos are buying these days.
Add comment