A few quick notes on discussions the administrator team has had, since we’ve fielded a lot of questions in these particular fields. We’re posting this both for transparency and to help us limit the load of having to respond to each of you individually.
- We would like to become an official nonprofit at some point, but there is a cost associated with this, we are not lawyers, and we might need to change where/how we collect donations to do so.
- We’ve upgraded the server approximately 7 times now. We’re trying to balance fiscal responsibility with server costs. We are aware that digital ocean isn’t the cheapest server and we are trying to be conservative with estimates and give ourselves extra runtime at whatever tier we are on. We’re also hoping that the upcoming lemmy version will solve a lot of our CPU-bound issues.
We are aware of the following bugs:
- the “report created” indicator flashes in the bottom left corner for some users randomly, even non-moderator users
- sometimes, briefly or without a refresh, the username in the top corner will not be your own; as far as we can tell this is purely cosmetic and is not a security issue
- sometimes the post you’re in changes to another post for no clear reason
I know most users here are against monetization, but I think that a simple Shopify storefront with behaw merch would go a long way to help entice more people to make a monitory donation. I would love a beehaw mug, stickers, and maybe even a shirt or a hat.
Good monetization: giving people tote bags, pens, t-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, or window clings “in exchange for a donation” like PBS does.
Bad monetization: selling the ability to downvote posts, selling avatars, selling the ability to have your post stickied, and all the other ways shitty forums sell prestigeFor only
$1/mo$5/vote, I’ll give your user the ability to downvote Comments in this thread only. Act now, time is limited!Can I pay you in the self-assessed cash value of my foot pic NFTs?
It’s going to be a long wait before the flood of PM_ME_UR_ profiles covers that.
Merch is a great way to fund, paying a designer to create some graphics could be cost-efficient.
I also really do not mind donating via Patreon or Ko-Fi or GoobGab or DinkleCoin or ScrungePay or whatever the hell people use that’s ethical now.
We do have an OpenCollective where you can donate and see our expenses: https://opencollective.com/beehaw
Though please don’t donate if you need the money, we’re doing fine financially.
The approximate yearly budget and estimated annual budget are quite different, what are those two numbers representing? Unrelated: I really appreciate what you’re making happen here, and I really look forward to being a part of it.
Good question! I don’t quite know but here’s what I think.
Estimated Annual Budget is
- All active monthly subscriptions. Multiply by 12.
- All active yearly subscriptions.
- All one-time subscriptions in the past year.
- All inactive monthly subscriptions that have contributed in the past year. https://docs.opencollective.com/help/collectives/budget#budget-calculations
Approximate yearly budget is what they we’ll spend for the year based on past transactions and trends? Note that this month will definitely be quite a bit more expensive than all previous ones (Probably something like ~500$) so this approximation is most definitely wrong.
The approximate yearly budget and estimated annual budget are quite different, what are those two numbers representing?
estimated annual we have no control over, i’d note in addition to the other reply, whereas i update approximate yearly with our hosting costs per month x12. we’ve had to upgrade a bunch this month so it’s a “best estimate of what our expenses would normally be” right now, though (and i just updated it to reflect more accurately where we’ll probably be when not needing to accommodate the big reddit surge)
I really like this idea, and I could even something that artists do on SoundCloud where an album costs $5 minimum but you can write in your own price above and beyond that initial $5.
I’d happily pick up a sticker and tack on a donation.
Thanks for what you’re doing, we appreciate it.
Incidentally, do you know why I would get a ‘language not allowed’ error when replying to a post that has no swearing/nsfw language?
I’m thinking it must be an error because there wasn’t anything remotely offensive in there.
Couldn’t see how to message a mod so apologies
There’s a select language button on the post. It’s still buggy but it allows you to filter out posts that are in other languages. Sometimes it’ll default to undefined or not let you post because it’s not selected
Oh that’s why! Thanks for clarifying
Thank you for all the tireless work. I can’t even imagine how slammed all of you must be right now.
Thank you for all the hard work! Hopefully things will eventually slow down and less pressure will be on your shoulders. This community is more relaxed and feels like a casual hang out if anything and it’s definitely a breath of fresh air. I’m glad to be here and I’ll be sticking around for sure
Not to throw an unwanted suggestion but would an OVHCloud eco server work for this?
I’m not an expert in any way but I’ve had no issues with my instance and it was a lot cheaper than anything else I could find.
We are busy investigating alternatives, thank you for your input
I mean I have a 10gbps home connection with 1gbps backup and a server rack! No but really, I came from enterprise architecture and built some massive global pubsub networks (on the tune of 900m users/devices). Be happy to give a hand on the infra side if needed!
if you’d like to chip in please join the discord or matrix- as a general statement we are not looking to have people self host beehaw for us at this point in time
I set up a recurring donation today, it’s small but I hope it helps. I’m so glad I found this place, thanks for having me. You guys are amazing, the world is better for having people like you in it!
So if we are a non profit coop, can we get paid for code contributions and moderation via the donation pool?
I’m 100% for paying people who deserve it but we do not have policies around this and we are not incorporated nonprofit yet
I think that would be the most awesome thing. Have you looked at social.coop for support?
not yet, but we’ll definitely be reaching out to the community around these sorts of things when we’re ready
Seems like a lot of instances are being hit hard today. The mod (Ruud) at lemmy.world has been posting about his server upgrades as well. Here’s his latest update: https://lemmy.world/comment/102234
Not surprising, given that today’s the day five thousand subreddits go dark. People have to get their internet fix somewhere.
Currently at 7742! (according to https://reddark.untone.uk/)
What are the current specs of the server y’all are using ?
Beehaw.org is run off Digital Ocean, they currently have 16 vCPUs and 32 gigs of ram. They plan on hopefully scaling back down once the whole reddit migration situation has calmed down.
That actually sounds pretty cheap. Unless digital ocean is way way way more expensive than aws?
It seems that Digital Ocean is considered relatively expensive actually.
Though I hear it has good support and it’s very easy to use. I can’t speak on how much AWS costs though, I’m unsure and don’t like supporting amazon regardless.
I’m in favor of (personally) paying more to avoid AWS also
Are you talking about a US 501(c)(3) kind of non-profit?
most likely (we also want to be a co-op i think, which may or may not be possible with that designation)? but we’re not experts on any of this and it’s such a far-in-the-future question relative to all the stuff we have going on now so it’s tough to even answer that definitively.
I’m a supporter of The Artisans Coop, if you need/want to see if they might have feedback or anything on the process. They have a Discord server.
