I’m just one person here, if this gains traction I’m gonna need some help with moderation and administration. Keeping this open to discuss the future possibilities!
I don’t know how much time I’d realistically be able to dedicate, but if this thing takes off I’m happy to help with moderating, admin, sysadmin stuff or even costs. I’m really happy this instance is here.
Hey, thank you for volunteering! Yeah, we can figure out the mechanics of it at some point. I think we just need some redundancy, 3-5 folks who can manage in different time-zones would be ideal.
As for the time necessary to dedicate, it varies I would say and I can’t really gauge it just yet. Some days even 5-10 minutes is enough to keep a cursory eye on things you know.
I’d also like to help, I’m in the Central European timezone. I don’t have any experience as a moderator, but am up for the challenge.
I would suggest a subscription model (a €$ a month or so) to finance the Server and give the mods some compensation, maybe this is offensive, I don’t know
Many of us probably don’t need this enough that we pay for it. I could get by with just rust weekly newsletter for the news. Then there is the official forums if I need to ask a question. The main use I got out of r/rust (and now am hoping to get out of this) is reading and learning interesting things, perhaps answering a few questions along the way. Not critical enough to for me to pay for it.
This is in a sense a sad state of affair. But you are probably never going to get enough critical mass to build a community if you paywall it. All websites that use some form of paywall that I can think of started out free to build that critical mass.
An optional subscription though could be something. Maybe you get a special marker at your name as a bragging right that you are a supporter? A star next to threads you start? Something like that. Several sites pulled of that model (two comes to mind immediately: twitch, phornix (a linux news website)). LWN.net (also a linux news website, more in-depth though) is an interesting example: it paywalls it main articles for a week, then they go open. Again, it didn’t start out that way though.
I don’t know if the underlying software supports optional subs though, another option could be a simple paypal tipjar or patreon, but you likely wouldn’t get as much that way.
