Looking at the stats it seems the growth of the number of active users (allowing reporting) has stopped in 2018 with a figure stable around 35k. I do believe Syncthing is the best solution around as far as synchronization is concerned and I am surprised the number of users doesn’t keep growing.
It is difficult to maintain a free open source project. My question is, with the current user base and revenues generated from donations and maybe paid support from corporates (if this service is proposed) is the project viable economically or at risk?
I am not sure what user base has todo with economical viability, as these two aren’t directly connected. Anyways, money stuff is all looked after by @calmh, so he’s the only one who can tell us how much net negative in terms of infra costs.
Thanks for the answer @AudriusButkevicius, I have been using Syncthing for several years and this is thanks to your huge work on it. I imagined the more users you have the more donations you get assuming let say 1% of us donate. But yes I see the correlation is low, Syncthing could be viable with 1 big corporate and not viable with 100k users.
I think the discovery server has a better view of the full population, currently about 145k active devices. As for the impact on economics… More users require more resources, so cost more money. There are donations coming in, currently at somewhat below the hosting rates, but Kastelo picks up the difference which is not enormous under the circumstances.
I suspect that the amount of donations happening is not a function of the number of users, but of the number of new users who happen to like the program.
I wouldn’t fret too much over that graph. If you look at last years summer period, the number of users was also almost stagnant. It would actually be really cool if the x-axis was scalable. And a fitting curve would also be nice. Well, numbers are fun, but time is also precious
Yes, there are currently only the disco-1 and disco-3 servers. I took disco-2 out of service as two three-thread VMs were plenty to serve the need with capacity to handle a failure of one. I see I also forgot to update the node list in prometheus, will fix that.
Yeah, but that’s always the case. “if we were/did/made/cared all …” and then least of us really do. No complain towards you, don’t get me wrong, that’s just the difference between wishing and reality.
<shame>I also did not spent anything, though I’m using syncthing regularly and am quite happy with it…</shame>
It is to realize that with 145k machines, a little contribution from the users makes a big difference for the developers. Then we need an incentive to make it happen: visible sponsoring on the GitHub page and the site by companies and users who want to be associated with the project vs. a yearly fee is a possibility some use. I’m just throwing some ideas, anyway they already have a solution with Kastelo.
