This is a little late, but I figure that it’s better late than never!
For full transparency, I’m just going to give a high level overview of the financial situation of lemmy.ca through June 2023, when I started to accept donations.
Total Expenses: $30.00
This includes all hosting fees, including backups, etc.
Total Contributions: $1,503.03
- $1,184.84 through LiberaPay
- $318.19 through OpenCollective
All contribution amounts are not including payment processor and/or OpenCollective fees.
Remaining Balance: $1,473.03
I plan on transferring the remaining balance to the new admin team, whenever they are ready to accept it.
Thank you to all that have contributed so far, I couldn’t have gotten the instance to where it is now without your generosity. I’m very excited to see what comes next and look forward to watching the instance grow more!
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Thanks for all your work here! I hope our community keeps growing.
I see the .ca it this a Canadian instance? New to lemmy please be kind
Yeah, it’s Canadian. If you go to the homepage and click on the sidebar, you can see the description of the instance and the country where it’s hosted. That works for any instance, I think.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !main@lemmy.ca)
You’re a good bot, I like you.
Welcome to Lemmy and to the Fediverse!
Thank you for everything you have done, including being transparent. This community already feels like our home!
Well, when people question the long term financial stability of lemmy I’ll just direct them to this post, haha.
Such a refreshing, uplifting breath of fresh air. This is what made me finally sign up on this instance. o7 to you sir, may you have the same happiness you bring the community. ❤️🩹
Maybe keep some in reserve to cover for future growth?
The current funds are enough to operate it at it’s current capacity for ~11 months. Once we get to accepting donations again and figure out how to set up our accounting, I would definitely like to see a growing contingency reserve fund built up to be ready for future unexpected growth or unexpected slowdown in donations.
We will continue to be transparent in a similar format to this but split the remaining balance in a operating fund and reserve fund.
You probably want to encourage subscribing for a (low) monthly donations in order to have a continuous, predictable baseline.
That’s the plan!
Can I make a suggestion? I would like to contribute but I can’t afford a lot and frankly I’m a little embarrassed about how little I can afford. idk if your plans involve any sort of flair for people who contribute, but if it does, can you ensure there is a minimal amount people can contribute, that still gets their flair but doesn’t say they are cheap/poor? Thanks.
IMO, if you can’t afford it, don’t do it. What we really need is the ones of us who can afford a few bucks a month to actually give it. We should be able to get enough without having people who can’t afford it to have to pick this over more basic needs.
Ever contribution is greatly appreciated even if it’s just 10 cents a month (please don’t actually donate just 10 cents, payment fees are more than that). We currently don’t have plans of doing flairs but if we ever do we will keep what you’ve mentioned in mind.
I’d do this
Nice to still see you around. I guess the transition hasn’t fully completed yet. At the current rate of expenses, it appears we have quite a healthy reserve.
I’ve decided to stick around for now to help out with Admin/server stuff, but everything has been fully transitioned over to them now.
We asked him to stick around for as long as he wants in whatever capacity he wants. Good to have his input for a longer transition period so we can carry on his way of doing things.
Thanks for all you’ve done, I hope this place just keeps growing!
I’d be happy to contribute with a recurring donation or subscription. Thanks for the awesome show, great job!
I believe that if someone sets up a recurring donation on LiberaPay it encourages them to basically merge together payments to cut down on processing fees (so instead of $5 per month, maybe $20 per 4 months). Are the amounts listed adjusted to be actually monthly, or is some of it for future months that just arrived early in which case we should expect a drop-off next month?
There will be a huge drop off to drop as part of the transition process to the new admin team we have paused donations at this time.
We’re on the fence if we want to accept further donations before registering as a not-for-profit to avoid any of the funds having to run through my personal bank account.
First off… Thanks to you and the team that keeps this instance running. It is very much appreciated.
If you feel uneasy with the funds you get and think that it is too much. Maybe consider passing on the excess to the developers of the software … the developers at Lemmy or the developers of the activitypub protocol.
It’s not just the instance owners that we should worry about, it is all those software developers that keep and maintain the software on an ongoing basis that make the fediverse possible.
I think this is a great idea. Or sponsor some bug triaging or something.
Or support 3rd party app developers?
All the options sound great.
I love seeing this, thank you!
How is hosting so cheap? is it really that light to host, or do you have a sweetheart deal?
$30 seems too cheap. Is this SelfHosted? If so your electricity bill and ISP subscription should add much more.
tagging @CanadianCorhen@lemmy.ca too because they asked the same question essentially.
the reason it was so cheap during June was that it used to be hosted on a VPS which i believe started with 4 CPU, and I kept upgrading it eventually to 8 CPU for the last few days. it then got migrated to a new dedicated server which is closer to around $150/month i believe.
$137.xx right now per month. Moving images to Object Storage will slowly add to that.
We figure even without significant efficiency improvements for Lemmy we should be able to handle easily 25,000 users or so without adding more resources to that.
Thanks for the info! that answers my question.
