hey folks, here's another meta-post. this one isn't specifically in response to the massive surge of users, but the surge is fortuitously timed because i've been intending to give a good idea of what our financial stability is like. as a reminder, we're 100%-user funded. everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
thanks to your generous support, we're pretty confident we have passed our current break-even point for this month, at which we wouldn't eventually need to pay out of our own pockets to keep the site running. that point in our estimation is about $26 a month or $312 a year. (please ignore OC's estimated yearly budget--we don't determine it lol)
our expenses are currently:
- $18/mo toward our host, Digital Ocean. (yesterday we upgraded from DO's $12 tier to its $18 tier to mitigate traffic issues and lag, and it's really worked out!)
- $2/mo for weekly backups
- $4/mo for daily snapshots of the website, which would allow us to restore the website in between the weekly backups if need be.
for a total of at least $26/mo in expenses. this may vary from month to month though, so we're baking in a bit of uncertainty with our estimation.
we currently have, for the month of June:
- $70/mo in recurring donations (at least for June)
- $200 this month in one-time donations
for a total of $270 this month. our total balance now stands at $331.31.
that balance means we now have about a year months of reserves currently, if we received no other donations and have no unexpected expenses.[^1] the recurring donations put us well into the green at this point.
this is good! everything past our break-even point each month is, to be clear, money we can save and put toward scaling up our infrastructure. there is no downside to donating after we've already met our "goal" of basic financial stability. doing so will have pretty straightforward practical implications for you: fewer 500s, 503s, better image support (this takes a lot of space!), and the website generally being run on more than potato hardware.[^2] if you'd like to do so in light of this information, our OpenCollective page is this post's link. thanks folks!
[^1]: we will have at least one upcoming expense but its size is TBD, and so is how we'll pay for it [^2]: especially during times like now, where we've likely been getting thousands or tens of thousands of hits an hour
That's great to hear! I'm still trying to wrap my head around the federation concept itself so if you don't mind, I have a question for you. In the event the site did go under (which it seems like is not the case, yay!) what happens to our account? Will we have to create a new account on another instance? If so, will we be able to use the same username?
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?
@Mersampa @CobolSailor
As someone who has like 1 hours worth of experience here, that cleared a lot up for me about how this works actually. Cheers!