Hi,
I’m looking into the financial side of the Fediverse at the moment. I’m wondering about the amount of money/time invested into the Fediverse.
Does anyone have any info on the estimated collective investments on Fediverse technology currently? The definition for Fediverse in this case may include Threads & Bluesky & possible others.
Any papers, hints, links etc are very welcome.
Mastodon publishes annual reports:
BlueSky raised some millions of dollars recently, but I don’t have a link (shouldn’t be hard to find).
NlNet contributes a lot of money.
If you talk time then a veritable Mount Everest of volunteer effort was spent on the fedi. It will be very hard to quantify that of course. Are you doing a study on the matter, or is it for personal purposes?
You could probably find financial records for some instances and software projects, try to file them into categories and then find stats about how many instances and software projects existed over time and try to match them to the categories. That way you could make a very rough estimate for the financial investments into the Fediverse.
You’d however also have to consider costs for hosting gits, websites about the Fediverse, real live Fediverse meetups and conferences and much much more.
I don’t think its possible to do anything like that for invested time.
Just as an example: I’m moderating climatejustice.social. There have been times where I was online pretty much all day and read a huge part of the public posts from the thousands of people I follow. That was always part private social media usage, part moderation, as I always had a moderator’s eye on each post and would intervene if I saw something.
I can’t even estimate the time I invested into the Fediverse, but it must be many thousands of hours. A low estimate of daily Fediverse activity (active moderation, writing guides/wikis, helping people, reporting issues, founding and running a non-profit association that runs Fediverse instances, preparing and holding talks and workshops, etc…) since I started moderating about 6 years ago, would be 1 hour. So 1x365x6=2190. It could have easily been 10.000 hours.
Thanks for sharing. Your personal experience is very helpful in painting a picture of the many hours people invest into the Fediverse.
I agree. The amount of volunteer work is impressive! If you’d like to share any personal experiences like @JoinFediverseWiki that would help me to paint a picture of this monumental effort.
My aim is to get a reasoned estimate on the Fediverse investments. Emphasises on the ‘reasoned’ and ‘estimate’ 
This may be used as a start for more serious research or contribute to policy debates, however my purpose is to use this for the Fediversity project in which I recently got involved.
Thanks for sharing this. Will look into this.
I lack both time and income to delve deeper into this very interested subject matter atm. For a project such as Fediversity I think it is very important to quantify where time and energy is spent specifically and to what outcome. There’s a serious, serious problem in how the Fediverse co-creators (because its more than only devs) are funded that has implications for its ability to innovate. While there has been progress on the Fediverse (with “fediverse” in meaning of ‘the installed base’ of social web technologies, specifically AS/AP) we’ve seen a 6 year involution on the open standards front and continuous protocol decay in the open social stack.
On this forum you’ll find countless posts of mine where I address aspects of these problems. I am no longer facilitating here, as I don’t think this place will rise above being just a discussion forum into a productive community-of-action.
Instead I started focusing on all the missing elements for a healthy open and decentralized commons-based ecosystem to emerge and evolve. This at a different place: social coding movement, where I started outlining major fedi challenges.
The big problem with the funding programs is that in general “substrate formation” - the coordination of people and processes needed for creating a robust open standards-based technology foundation - is hardly funded, and where it is funded this only includes pure technical work.
While “show don’t tell” releases of technical artifact are first requirement for technology adoption, for broad adoption at the scale and ambition level of the social web, tech-creation is less than half of the work.
Holistic sustainability and sustainability-first approaches are needed, and totally different approaches to organizing in grassroots movements (and have any hope that they remain commons-controlled and not become corporate hellholes that can only lead us to dystopia).
(All these themes are addressed at social coding movement. Adressed… well, with the side-note that only “fostering emergence” will give any meaningful elaboration under the movement’s umbrella.)
The diagram at this topic sketches the idea somewhat:
If you are interested to participate and exchange thoughts there are 2 matrix chatrooms:
PS. The acronym “FOSS” in the diagram was a tease. I consider SOSS to be the foundation for a healthy Open social stack, i.e. Sustainable open social software / systems. And FOSS = SOSS + hobby projects 
PS2. I tooted about this subject at: https://social.coop/@smallcircles/113792270801035073
I’ve been advocating for and testing decentralised communication tools since the late 1990s. Initially email lists, and briefly FreeNet. Then Jabber and Wave (XMPP). A few years I kicked the tires on the original identi.ca and on Diaspora.
But I’ve been regularly active in the fediverse since about 2013-ish. Around the time that StatusNet and its various forks merged into the GNU social project. Around that time, the Qvitter web app was developed and made the default interface on a group of Gs servers, including quitter.se where I had an account (as did @clacke@libranet.de).
My coding skills are very limited, but I’ve contributed to fediverse development through a combo of evangelizing and connecting. Researching and documenting fediverse software and support sites, particularly for fediverse.party, and writing about them for my Disintermedia blog. Also making contact with their devs, and other evangelists, and facilitating conversations and collaborations that might lead to improvements.
It’s hard to quantify exactly how many hours I’ve put into all this. But if like @JoinFediverseWiki I guess roughly an hour a day, since 2013 that’s about 5000 hours. I’d say that’s a very conservative estimate.
At the current Living Wage (NZ$27.80), that’s roughly $150,000 worth of work. But I’ve never been paid for a single hour of this work for the fediverse itself. Although through a fediverse post I did find some casual contract work for a Jabber-based project called Snikket.
Since late 2022, I’ve been trying to set up a cooperatively-owned fediverse hosting service, under the name bridgeseat.nz. As a way of making a modest living out of helping more people access the fediverse, particularly in Aotearoa (where I’m from).
This is actually European public money. NLnet is funneling the money to free software, but this is public money, paid for by tax payers across the European Union. As such, grantees working on ActivityPub have a moral responsibility to fellow tax payers.
Probably @nlnet@nlnet.nl could compile the total grant amount towards ActivityPub software development so far?