Conversation

I've had to take down my Piped instance at piped.platypush.tech.

As my Linode bills were getting more and more expensive, I've had to move some services inside of my home network - and Piped is among them.

Once I moved Piped within my home network, it really started taking a toll on my connectivity. Streaming videos to ~20 users simultaneously, with no Cloudflare in front, from a home DSL connection takes quite of a toll.

Since many have been using the service but nobody has bothered to contribute to so far, I've decided to take it down and move it to a domain that I won't advertise this time.

I like to self-host, and I'll always keep doing it. And I also like to give something back to society - many have been using my services for years, and I'm ok if others use them. I'll always offer them free of charge and I'll always respect everybody's privacy.

But there's a limit to everything.

One thing is to offer a search engine aggregator or an ebook hosting service for free. Another thing is to provide a media streaming service, running on a home connection, for free.

It cost me money to run Piped on a Linode instance (precisely ~$100/month extra on my Linode bills for a beefier 16GB machine), and it costs bandwidth and electricity to run it on my home network.

Free software (and services) should be free as in speech, not as in a free beer.

I've asked multiple times for users to contribute to keep the lights on, but haven't received a single penny - all while I got on average ~5 video views per minute that prevent me from even having a videocall on my own home network.

If you really love free software, but you can't run it yourself on your machines for whatever reason, please at least bother to financially contribute to the instances that you use. Otherwise you're just a freeloader who does more harm than good to the free software.