It was pretty surprising to read their first update that had it at $12 a month! Though my server is running on a $2 a month VPS (currently) and doing pretty well so when you don’t have too many users it doesn’t cost an awful lot to run (so long as your technical people are donating their time!)
There’s a financials post here: https://beehaw.org/post/416496
And near the bottom of this page you can see the donations made, the money actually spent, and their current balance: https://opencollective.com/beehaw
I wish I’d known about Beehaw earlier, though before this influx it seems there wasn’t a huge amount of content as the community was pretty small.
I have known about Lemmy for some time, but the more popular instances were basically filled with people who had been kicked off reddit for their views. It was not a welcoming place, so until now I hadn’t felt comfortable hanging around.
Are they not? The donation page says “This Collective’s Fiscal Host is a registered 501©(3) non-profit organization. Your contribution will be tax-deductible in the US, to the extent allowed by the law.”
I presumed this was based on the umbrella you were accepted under to be on opencollective?
Haha yes, it’s like a big foot reaching out to give reddit a kick in the pants: https://the-federation.info/node/details/25274
I think it’s normal after a big surge to see participation drop off. If you can hit the critical mass to keep content flowing, that would be awesome.
And at least in the short term, it’s appreciated that the site is now running much smoother! That’s also important for retention of users :)
It will be interesting to see how many users stick around. It’s busy right now but in a month you may be able to backtrack to the previous hardware.
80/20 rule.
When you are creating something like Lemmy, where you want wide uptake, you need to pander to the masses.
The /r/selfhosted surveys show around half of self-hosters mostly or exclusively use docker. A significant portion of the rest can use docker if needed.
If you’re in the 20% that isn’t covered by the most common setup, then it can be frustrating. But supporting that 20% takes as much effort as supporting the other 80% (see 80/20 rule), and when things are new it’s just not where the effort should be focused.
So you have all those servers, but why can’t you install debian or ubuntu server on one of them?
You could also get a $2/month VPS and run it on that. Beehaw is run on something similar (though apparently $12 a month, but a lot more users).
I like the email analogy.
When you want to use email, you sign up for an account. It doesn’t matter if you go to gmail or hotmail or something else, you can still communicate with anyone else that has email.
Now if your username for email is fred@hotmail.com and then that server went down, you would no longer have access to your account, people couldn’t contact you. If you then decided to set up a gmail account, you would only be able to get the account fred@gmail.com if no one else had taken it. The name “fred” is not reserved for you across all email providers.
Federated platforms like Lemmy (which Beehaw is part of) work the same way. Your account is not @CobolSailor but @CobolSailor@beehaw.org. If Beehaw went under and no longer existed, you can go and sign up on another server, e.g. lemmy.ml. But you could only use @CobolSailor@lemmy.ml if it was not taken by someone else, it’s not reserved for you across all servers - and can’t be, because there is no central server keeping track.
Does that explain it?
I joined when you had under 1000 users total, now there are 1.3k online at this very moment. I can imagine it’s quite a strain!