How are you guys doing financially? Are you in need of donations for servers?
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Lemdroid
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Hey, thanks for asking. I run all of the backend - including paying for the costs associated. Lemdro.id has a pretty unique architecture that has taken a lot of work to perfect. As a result, we can scale down and up extremely easily as ijeff mentioned.
I will be setting up an OpenCollective eventually to accept donations, but I wanted to get the architecture stable and lemdro.id fast before I allowed people to contribute towards it. Just for your information, current hosting costs are looking to be around ~$35/mo which I am quite alright with funding on my own until I get that setup. Financially backing lemdro.id, once launched, will allow me to take advantage of the scaling architecture I've built to deploy servers to different regions outside of the US to keep response times low globally, too.
The idea was to make a big "state of the lemdro.id" post soon-ish that details costs, architecture, and importantly transparency. Our admin and moderation teams are fully transparent to the public via our Matrix setup, and the server architecture is slowly being integrated with GitHub. The idea is to allow the community to make contributions to improving the architecture of the instance they use by submitting PRs which then get deployed to a staging environment once reviewed and eventually pulled into production as well.
TL;DR: Yes, we will accept donations via OpenCollective which will allow us to expand lemdro.id globally to offer lower access times in other continents. This will become available once some personal goals I have set to increase lemdro.id transparency and open-source-ness are met.
If you'd like, I can ping you once I've got it setup, but you can expect to see a post in the [email protected] in the next couple of weeks regarding this anyways!
35 dollars is way less than what I expected. Once you open the possibility to donate, you should have no problems getting that funding from the community. I'll be happy to chip in! No need to ping me specifically, I'll see the announcement for sure.
Keep doing the good work, I (and others for sure too) appreciate it!
Thanks! Yeah the costs are low because I've had the luxury to tune and architect lemdro.id properly before putting it out to the world for users. Our scaling methodology is really unique amongst lemmy, we are one of only two instances scaling horizontally (although we are doing so in dramatically different ways).
I figure the only way to guarantee long-time support and consistency is to keep hosting costs low so we aren't dependent on large amounts of financial goodwill from small amounts of people.
Glad you're liking lemdro.id, it has grown better than I even expected!
Thanks for asking! [email protected] has been covering everything thus far. He's been putting in a lot of work to get lemdro.id setup in a way that scales exceptionally well for demand while also keeping costs low. He'll be setting something up soon to allow us to pitch in. We had been nagging him about letting us contribute, but he wanted to get the costs down before accepting any assistance.
More to come. Feel free to also join us on the Matrix Space, which includes a publicly available read-only Admin chat as part of our overall vision of being a transparent and fully open sourced instance - https://matrix.to/#/#lemdro.id:matrix.org.
I just migrated from lemmy.world :)
Welcome!
Is it possible to request communities? 'Cause I think a ChromeOS community would also be a good fit here. Currently there is such a community on Lemmy.world, but it's not very active.
We're certainly open to it. Our general aim is to help facilitate migrations over from Reddit, so we can get in touch with them to see if they're interested.
[email protected] also paging you since you're a ChromeOS user!
....deep grumbly sounds......
Problem with highly specialised and niche communities is you always run foul of having too many Help Vampires and, from my scant playing with my cheapo Chromebook and others asking about how it runs / does it play games (no, it doesn't have an accelerometer) etc I'd be cautious.
For example having c/Apple is great but when you get down to c/iOS that's when you see moar Vampires + screenshots of issues and you know my thoughts on those.....
c/askApple + c/AskPleaseSendHelpRiteNAO
: shrug :
Where are the new posts are we defesarated again?
we are not defederated, but the sorting is acting up. I'm on vacation right now but have been looking into it. We'll be upgrading to 0.19 once the .2 patch hits which I suspect will resolve this issue. For now, I've found that there are a few "stuck" posts and under those sorting is pulling in new stuff.
If you're browsing all, the workaround right now is to sort by "hot" instead of "active"