Hi. As you may know, I’ve opened the instance about 12 days ago. Right now, the instance is ranked 6th out of hundreds of instances.
We’re now using 4 vCPU and 16GB RAM server for 38€ which is very cheap (Not that cheap anymore. We’re using dedicated 16 CPU, 48GB RAM server for 160€). But we need donations to continue uploading media or even to increase the limit and move to a better server against instant load. Also we transfered 5TB of media only in 12 days 🤷♂️ Thanks to Cloudflare, this didn’t cause much trouble to us.
If you want to donate, here’s donation platforms we use:
Note: I removed old crypto payment methods and Patreon kicked us. We got $182 with old crypto payment methods and $80 from Patreon.
Hello, team at LemmyNSFW,
I’m delighted to see your instance growing and I completely support the idea of donating to ensure the longevity and quality of this platform. Your hard work in maintaining and developing this instance is very much appreciated.
However, I’d like to bring up the idea of financial transparency within our community. Have you considered using a platform like Open Collective for your donation system? It has been adopted by other instances, including Lemmy.world. You can see an example of how they use it here: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
In my opinion, Lemmy.world is a shining example of how a Lemmy instance should operate financially. They provide transparency about their finances, which has greatly contributed to building trust with their users and the platform as a whole.
Considering we’re part of an open-source, decentralized platform, I believe this level of transparency is paramount. It not only helps in building trust but also encourages more users to donate, knowing exactly how their contributions will be utilized.
Moreover, seeing big instances openly donating back to the source code developers could set a wonderful precedent. This act of giving back to those who helped create the foundation of our platform would be a tremendous demonstration of gratitude and community spirit.
Again, I am wholeheartedly in support of donating to this community, and I hope my suggestion will be taken into consideration. Keep up the fantastic work!
Going to have to agree that something like this would be good. Lets people see all in one place where we stand and what is needed.
Yes. And I’m genuinely ok with big staff spends. Spend it on hookers and cocaine for all I care. All is like to see is that some percentage is committed and shown to be given back to the source code developers.
Agreed, there’s nothing wrong with making a living. 👍
I’d love to see if we could get enough donations going to distribute to content creators? Maybe this is a more mainstream instance/general purpose NSFW, but it would be very cool to see an instance giving ownership to its content creators.
Thank you for your opinion! I would like to do this too but we don’t use single payment method. Also does Open Collective approve payments or should we trust the admin for this? And do admins attach bills somewhere?
Open collective (of which I have zero affiliation) is working on taking cryptocurrency payments. Last I checked it was in beta.
You can give evidence where you feel it would be beneficial. But yeh. You could always find work arounds.
If it’s something you genuinely want to explore, I’m happy to volunteer some of my time to help you with implementing and managing that.
The key thing I’d like to see in all instances, not just yours, is transparency in income, plus some sort of transparency as to how much that may be given back to the community and the source code development.
Honestly. What’s done with the rest, I care very little.
Can you contact me from Matrix? my address is @xaeg:matrix.org
How big a proportion of potential supporters do you think would prefer to pay in crypto?
I’m in column A, but not column B. Just for “statistical purposes”.
If we were a non-NSFW instance, I wouldn’t add crypto but anonymity is important for some people (me included).
I definitely understand where you’re coming from, I was just attempting to debate cost/value.
Almost half of the supporters donating from crypto, so I don’t think its unnecessary.
Cool to know 🤘
I’d probably prefer pay in crypto. Also receive in crypto TBH. Just for anonymity’s sake.
I mean since you brought up crypto I accept that as a given.
Just think that most people aren’t into crypto as much as those who are into crypto like to think.
Oh no. I agree. I brought it up because the instance is already taking crypto payments.
Out of curiosity how much storage are you using either total or on average with this instance? I feel like with the amount of media being uploaded it’s likely slightly larger than others.
It was about 30GB when I checked two days ago.
Edit: it’s 33 now.
Could consider utilising storage buckets for this - Backblaze B2 is $0.005 per GB/month and has partnerships with Cloudflare etc. Should reduce your costs pretty well.
Have you checked IONOS?
I support you my friend both monetarily and conceptually.
You’re one of the people I’ve seen from the very beginning. Thank you for your support!
I suggest you to use XRP, TRX and LTC for cheap transaction fees and speed, and check out a VPS provider called IONOS.
Edit: I suggest you BTW to open an OnlyFans and Fansly account for the instance and try to carry creators to the platform maybe you can make a special community for them and get some extra donations.
Do you have a particular coin for this in mind? I don’t want to seperate this much.
XRP
I set up a Patreon subscription. I am a DevOps Engineer. If you ever need to move to a more distributed setup let me know.
Thank you for your support! But to keep costs low, we had to keep for one server for now. But you’re in my mind if needed :)
If u need it I have a HomeLab where I can host an instance of it
I don’t know if you already run on docker, but you could run on docker in order to simulate a distributed setup and be able to move the various pieces in and out as needed, also portainer and traefik are very nice for this, if you create a common network for all containers with a bit of docker compose magic you have a plug and play kind of setup
Same. I’m happy to answer any questions or assist with the infra. This is basically what us idiots DevOps/SRE do on a daily basis: cut costs while improving performance and reliability.
I joined this instance for the NSFW, but at the moment it is the best performing instance I am on, so I am subscribing to all my tech communities through here as well. In other words, my NSFW account is now my main account. LOL. Going to Patreon for sure.
EDIT: I signed up for $5/month. Keep up the good work!
PS: Would you mind sharing your docker-compose file? I want to deploy a lemmy instance on GCP to help strengthen the network.
Thank you for your support! But I really didn’t changed the compose file. I just used default ansible setup for simplicity.
Just a headsup if you’re trying to get on Open Collective, it looks like that might be another patreon scenario:
Yeah I checked TOS too. I thought it’s about posts shared on campaign page. Also Open Collective Europe didn’t reject us. But you are right. I’ll contact about this to Open Collective and fiscal host.
🫡 good idea.
Would it be possible to set up Liberapay as a payment method? I don’t know their policy on NSFW-related projects, but I really enjoy it as a payment option since they don’t take anything off what’s donated, give many different donation options, and is run by a non-profit that made the site’s code open-source.
Unfortunately I can’t create account there since I can’t use PayPal nor Stripe.
Why can’t you use pp?
I live where it’s banned :/
Also PayPal hates anything related to human sexuality
I was really surprised to see that youre using a .com-domain. That alone must be costing you a small fortune per year.
Domains cost like $9 a year.
Yeah it’s 9.15 on Cloudflare right now. Costly thing in our infrastructure is going to be storage and server specifications. I’ll migrate to S3 as soon as Lemmy 0.18.1 releases.
Is S3 more cost efficient? I have had experience with it being much more reliable and durable, but the cost in the long run could be higher than having it next to the service
20TB of file is going to cost us 300$ in the future. It is close to free IMO :) Also some providers doesn’t charge eggress fees and/or API usage.
Edit: For reference, Hetzner bills 44€ for 1TB data volume.
Maybe I’m misreading it, but if you are mainly looking for better pricings, isn’t something like Backblaze B2 even cheaper?
I never used it, but when I was searching for a media host I remember it was the overall better one, pricing wise, being in the Bandwidth Alliance and all that.
But I seriously checked them a long time ago so it could be different, now.
Yeah it was my first choice too. But the thing is, egress fees are free if you use it through Cloudflare. Pictrs (Lemmy’s media service) directly communicates with S3 service. So it will be cheaper per TB but I have to pay for downloads.
Also found Wasabi. It costs 6$ per TB with no API or download fees. I’ve researched, it seems to only allow as much bandwidth as you store.
Amazon and Google’s prices are known.
I will use Cloudflare R2 as the last option. It bills $15 per TB. There is no extra fee but API.
Doesn’t it Amazon charge for data transfer? I.e the more requests you’ll get, the more they’ll bill?
Please see this comment
Interesting. Ive never checked on things through Cloudflare. Godaddy and Google charge like 3000 USD for a com domain
Those are probably premium domains. A registrar buys that domain and resells it.
What domain are you looking at that costs 3k
Thank you so much for hosting this instance. I appreciate it and will help with a small contribution of a few dollars per month from now own. ❤️
Thank you! Every dollar is important and you can be sure that we will use every single dollar for this instance.
I would gladly send Monero [XMR] if you had the option.
Hmm. Let me check MetaMask for it.
Nope, MetaMask only supports Ethereum or derivates. I’ve used MyMonero for it.
Check the post again, they added a monero option
Maybe I’ve already did? I have plausible deniability ;) The Monero blockchain is not transparent.
But for the sake of transparency, if the admins want to, they can post a monthly summary of XMR donations.
Of course. I’ll check what I can do.
Of course, I just wanted to let you know in case you didn’t see it. A monthly summary would be appreciated
Thank you for doing this in the first place! Do you maybe have PayPal? Otherwise I’ll look into Patreon 😊
You’re welcome! I really wish I had a PayPal account but unfortunately not :/
Where is the link to donate?
It’s removed because I’ll transfer instance to someone else.
May I ask where the server is hosted?
Currently Ukraine. May change in the future.
Oh nice. And what platform do you use?
I can’t say that for a while. I don’t want to doxx myself.
I don’t know how saying what platform is used to host the server will affect its security that much.
For example, the fact you are using cloudflare is public and doesn’t really harm you.
Yeah it doesn’t but its a shield in front of host itself. We’re not doing anything illegal here but still.
I mean, it would be trivial to find for anyone who cares to run a ping and do a Google search for the IP it resolves. You’re definitely not shielding yourself from any government agencies by keeping it secret.
The reason they won’t reveal is because Pornography is flat out banned in Ukraine, if we revealed this someone might report us and get the host taken away again, similar to what happened when the server used Hetzner.
Probably a really stupid and ignorant question, but how are you hosting in Ukraine when they are at war?
They need money now more than before. Why would they stop exporting stuff?
People still live, work and study over there. The country is big and the front is away from many people lives.
I have been locked out of my NSFW account activating the 2FA function
I’m looking for it.
Thx so much
Ok I set the 2fa as null. You can login now. If you can’t, we tucked up.
Thx
