We recently crossed the first anniversary for many of us on Lemmy and the Fediverse, and we are thrilled to announce an important milestone: we have started a new registered not-for-profit organization! The organization is registered as ‘Federated Open Communications Canada’, and we will go by 'Fedecan' in our day-to-day operations.
Over the past few months, we have been working behind the scenes on the necessary paperwork, bylaws, and other administrative tasks to get the organization rolling. Thanks to the invaluable feedback from our previous check-in, we decided to take the leap and register federally, which will allow us to operate across Canada more easily. For more details, you can check out the FAQs on our new website.
Resuming Donations
With this important step completed, we are now ready to resume accepting donations. We have set up several donation options to accommodate different preferences on convenience and fees. Our first priority is to reimburse those who have been covering server and other costs, and to set up regular financial updates. We are open to adding more donation options, so please let us know if there is an option you prefer.
Our current costs
- Server hosting - $150/month
- Domains registrations - $50/year
- Non profit requirements - $500 one time
Our Next Steps:
- Reimburse individuals who have covered server and operational costs and to set up more regular financial updates
- Collaboratively creating guides and learning resources about Lemmy and the Fediverse (ex. how things work, data/privacy details, and best practices for moderating or running instances, etc.) + translations
- Exploring other platforms to run. Some that are on our radar include Sublinks, Pixelfed, and Matrix
- Developing logos, colours, and other branding details based on ideas from the community
What we want to know:
- Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns? This will also help us expand our FAQs
- Which other platforms would you like us to explore?
- Do you prefer any other donation method?
We want to help build a better online experience for everyone, and that requires an organization with a strong foundation. This should be the first step in that process.
Thank you for everything so far, and we look forward to seeing you around! 🥳
The Fedecan Team
You mentioned the costs for server hosting, domain registration and non-profit requirements, which is great so we have an idea of how much needs to be covered with donations going forward.
You also mentioned reimbursing people for past costs. What's the current debt?
Thanks for doing all of this.
Since we took over in June 2023, truckbc has been paying personally for the server. All costs including the non profit registration (covered by me) have added up to about $2500 so far.
I don't have the number handy but going off memory, Smorks has about $1000 in donations from before he was going to transfer our way.
Ideally I'd just like to keep our finances totally public, but we're not that organized yet.
That's not something I know anything about, so I'll let you guys sort out what to do there (along with everything else) :)
But given what you've been open about so far:
~$1500 in debt ~$155/month ongoing costs (amortizing the domain reg over the year)
Thanks, I'll come up with a good donation amount based on these numbers :)