No Cash‽ Several Ways You Can Freely Help Your Fediverse Admin
With the Fediverse surpassing 8 million accounts (at least on Mastodon), many server admins are burning through cash in order to provide enough resources to keep their sites online.
Some server bills are exceeding $2,000 per month, which is why some are adopting premium & freemium methods to help cover their bandwidth & hosting fees.
Although donating to your local admin is ideal, some people are unable to contribute financially due to circumstances in life (i.e. inflation costs, food costs, utilities, debt, etcetera) that take precedence over digital donations.
In lieu of contributing cash, here are several ways Fediverse folks can freely bless their server admins.
Greeting Newbies
Many people’s first time entrance upon a Fediverse instance can be lonely, especially if they are fleeing a much larger service like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, etcetera.
Greeting newcomers might appear trite, but that first interaction could determine whether someone becomes a life long member of the Fediverse.
If you have the time, greet newcomers who enter an instance by:
- Following them & recommending people they should follow
- Offer advice about the Fediverse rules & culture (assume they do no know)
- Make sure their interaction upon the instance is a positive one
- If they have issues, either try to resolve it or find someone who can
Greeting is simple & helps foster a welcoming environment & helps dispel any notions of the Fediverse being a hostile space.
Watcher Of Evil
Unfortunately, along with newbies joining the Fediverse, there are nefarious actors who simply enjoy harassing others online for wicked reasons.
Instance admins can not be everywhere & online all the time, which is where Watchers come in to help alleviate the burden of keeping an instance troll free.
A Watcher’s job is very simple as they are required to:
- Confront individuals purposely violating the server rules
- Report individuals to moderators who threaten the culture & safety of the community
- Constantly watch for Spam accounts, & flag them for removal
Watchers could be assigned an official role upon a server, & enough of them could help make a moderator & admin’s life easier when it comes to weeding out wicked individuals.
Example: Counter Social has very few moderators (I assume just one), but thousands upon thousands of unofficial watchers. The community itself does an excellent job of weeding out spammers, trolls, & hostile actors which makes moderation much easier for the moderator(s).
Moderator Against Monsters
Moderating a server is more or less a thankless job that does not come with many benefits (& can often lead towards burn out).
However, if one has the time, mental fortitude & proper judgement of character, moderating for free is a great way to bless your local admin saving them time & money (especially in the legal arena).
The number of moderators upon any instance is up to the local admin, however there should be enough moderators to properly manage a site (whether it’s one or over 1,000 moderators).
Contrary to popular myth, large instances can be effectively moderated, but that depends upon how many Watchers are actively engaged in the community & how fast a Moderator can respond to issues that appear.
Bonus: Outsource Media Content
If none of the roles appeal to a person, they can also do something very simple to help reduce admin server costs by using third party services to do “the heavy lifting.”
Instead of uploading audio, video, high resolution images, documents, etcetera, directly upon a server, a person could simply upload media file types using these alternatives.
- Video: Youtube, Vimeo, or Peertube
- Audio: SoundCloud, Youtube (yes, people do this) or Funkwhale
- Documents or Files: Google One, Scribd, Microsoft 365 or Nextcloud
Uploading elsewhere might appear trivial, but it can help reduce the operating cost for an admin, which means they can commit more resources elsewhere or even use the extra funds to pay their moderators a small stipend.
Any Other Suggestions
If you have reached the end of this lengthy post & believe the options offered are incomplete (note: they probably are), feel free to message me on Mastodon or Matrix with suggested additions or links (which will be added below).
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