this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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All these websites have almost always been net cash flow negative. They bleed venture capital to provide a service below cost in order to build a user base.
The problem now is interest rates have spiked. Rates have been basically zilch for much of the internet's history over the past 20+ years, so sites could actually operate for quite some time on super cheap debt that they almost never had to repay. And venture capital firms would just keep pouring money into the "next best thing".
Now that debt is rapidly becoming much more expensive to maintain, and those VC investors want their chunk of the pie back in their pockets. And they are going to extract it from every single one of these centralized services by whatever force is necessary. It's only just getting started, you watch.
Note that they are cashflow negative because of expensive advertising features.
Twitter is pretty cheap to run for base functionality and if you open up dev console and see all of the resources Twitter is requesting its like 90% ad stuff and suggestions.
But advertising is also where 90% of their revenue comes from- so really, given the service is "free", what is the product?
That's just bandwidth, though. What about database load? A big part of Lemmy's growing pains come from slow database queries. It doesn't take much bandwidth to send you the content, but the server has to do a lot of work to figure out which content to send you.
Every request is tied to some functionality. Databases and storage is laughably cheap these days.
The complex queries and all the overhead features is where the real expense is. Crafting a personal, ad-optimized timelines is what's costing Twitter the most money. The public/subscribed feeds of mastodon are incredibly efficient even on something super slow like ruby on rails.
Lemmy is having the same problem and doesn't have ads.
Does it though? This instance has thousands of users and interactions already and is running on just few dollars a month.
It's running on a few hundred dollars a month, if I recall correctly, and it has only about 450 users per day. (The sidebar statistics don't include a figure for peak concurrent users, unfortunately, and that's what we really need to know.)
Ah didnt see that increase though decentralized systems are inheritly very inefficient unfortunately
The issue I saw was with answering user requests for content—which post do you want to see, which community was it posted to, which comments are on that post, who wrote them, what are their vote scores, and so on. Nothing to do with decentralization. Reddit would have had the same problem, and judging from early Reddit's performance and reliability woes, it probably did have the same problem.
That's just bad engineering tbh.
Nobody's born knowing how to optimize database queries. Optimization is hard and arcane, and SQL is no exception.
I didn't look into this but this looks way more complicated than it should be. The query in the issue looks absolutely ridiculous tbh.
I think it's just the lack of line breaks. The first query, once you unroll it, looks like what you need to fetch and display a list of posts. I don't see anything extraneous in there.
You can't lose money forever, not as a business. What's great about the Fediverse is that it makes social media something that can be done as a hobbyist project. Money is nice, but the hobbyist isn't necessarily out to make money.