Hi all, I’m relatively new to this instance but reading through the instance docs I found:

Donations are currently made using snowe’s github sponsors page. If you get another place to donate that is not this it is fake and should be reported to us.

Going to the sponsor page we see the following goal:

@snowe2010’s goal is to earn $200 per month

pay for our 📫 SendGrid Account: $20 a month 💻 Vultr VPS for prod and beta sites: Prod is $115-130 a month, beta is $6-10 a month 👩🏼 Paying our admins and devops any amount ◀️ Upgrade tailscale membership: $6-? dollars a month (depends on number of users) Add in better server infrastructure including paid account for Pulsetic and Graphana. Add in better server backups, and be able to expand the team so that it’s not so small.

Currently only 30% of the goal to break-even is being met. Please consider setting up a sponsorship, even if it just $1. Decentralized platforms are great but they still have real costs behind the scenes.

Note: I’m not affiliated with the admin team, just sharing something I noticed.

  • BehindTheBarrier
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    2 months ago

    If Reddit back in the day had asked a few dollars for me to stick with using 3rd party apps using the API I would have. But they did the opposite, so here I am. First time actually donating to something, a measily $2 dollars a month, but hopefully a start to fund some of the free stuff I use.

    • thesmokingman
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      2 months ago

      $2/mo is pretty close to what Reddit premium was back before they turned the Reddit silver meme into a real thing! That’s a great amount to donate. Don’t sell yourself short.

    • starshipwinepineappleOP
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      2 months ago

      The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user. Even $1/mo is quite a bit more than the average user cost. So $2 isn’t so measly when putting it into that perspective!

      • lysdexic
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        2 months ago

        The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user.

        Things should be put into perspective. The cost per user is actually the fixed monthly cost of operating an instance divided by the average number of active users.

        In the discussion you linked to, there’s a post on how Lemmy.ml costs $80/month + domain name to serve ~2.4k users. If we went through opex/users metric, needlessly expensive setups with low participation would be a justification to ask for more donations.

        Regardless, this is a good reminder that anyone can self-host their own Lemmy instance. Some Lemmy self-host posts go as far as to claim a Lemmy instance can be run on a $5/month virtual private server from the likes of scaleway.

    • DrDeadCrash
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      2 months ago

      Ok, I’m in for $2 /month too, thanks for setting the standard!

  • Kissaki
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    2 months ago

    The server sidebar has an uptime stat. Could also have a simple monthly costs covered percent stat.

  • MagicShel
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    2 months ago

    I appreciate you pointing this out. Today is literally my first day on the job after 5 months, but I’ll throw some cash their way after a check or two.

  • TrumpetX
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    2 months ago

    If you’re thinking of something like $1-2/month, also consider doing a 30 dollar 1 time thing (it saves on transaction fees) and you basically just paid for 2-3 years of donations.

    • starshipwinepineappleOP
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      2 months ago

      From what i can tell there are no transaction fees for sponsorships from personal accounts, and organizations pay 6% (or 3% if invoicing). (Source)

      Is there something else I’m not seeing?

      • lysdexic
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        2 months ago

        Is there something else I’m not seeing?

        Possibly payment processing fees. Some banks/payment institutions charge you for a payment.

    • lkdm
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      2 months ago

      Annual only is a good middle-ground

  • sudo
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    2 months ago

    fwiw headscale is pretty easy to self host and has minimal system requirements.

  • hector@sh.itjust.works
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    2 months ago

    I don’t have a bank account ATM but I’ll be happy to send some ETH if the admin has an address !

  • szczuroarturo
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    2 months ago

    It would be nice if there was something for annynomus donations ( you need to login to github ).