Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?

I currently have a day job not related to this at all. I'm a software developer by day. I currently accept donations that go towards the hosting of this instance. The users so far have been very generous, so we have enough to carry us for around 6 months (from what I remember), based on current usage. As long as we don't get any huge spikes in usage (and i'm likely talking about in the thousands of new users joining), we should be ok for a while. If donations slow down I will be able to maintain the instance on my own, but ideally i'm hoping it can run off donations. I will be as transparent as I can be about this instances financials, as I plan on doing a monthly (maybe every other month?) "State of the Instance" type post, that I've seen done on mastodon, and some other lemmy instances too.

My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.

I have no plans to ever profit from this. All donations will 100% go towards our hosting costs. If, for whatever reason, this instances changes owners, I will transfer whatever donations are left over to the new owner as well.

If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.

Thank you! You can see from the donation link above how much we currently have. As I said earlier, we've had quite a few generous donors, so I'll let that up to you! I'll be adding my hosting expenses into opencollective as well so that will be visible too.

Hopefully I've answered most of your questions? If there's anything I've missed or if you have other questions, let me know!

that would never happen to any commercial social media service out there.

Actually it does. Lots of people used to talk to the dude who started Twitter and he would respond. Making "important" people accessible to randos like you or I was kind of the major benefit of the whole service, especially in the early days.

Likewise, I've personally had comment chains back and forth with /u/spez on Reddit on many occasions, and a few other notable admins, founders and CEOs too (keysersosa, aaronsw, yishan and kn0thing spring to mind) although they weren't necessarily CEO at the time.

That said, it certainly is nice when communities can stay small enough to still have regular interactions with each other, admins and users alike. And fediverse is designed to promote exactly that. These huge communities like lemmy.world and even lemmy.ca are sort of a sign we're not using it quite "right" and we're still following the "centralized" model, but that's okay they are serving an important role for now and will continue to serve an important role probably forever, but hopefully never too important, and it will always be possible to break out into smaller more specialized communities but still stay in touch with these bigger ones.

If you're interested in seeing how much they're getting in donations, the sidebar of lemmy.ca lists their opencollective and liberapay - the numbers are listed publicly. They get CA$30.59 per week from liberapay (CA$122.36/mo) and CA$21/mo on opencollective. Roughly $100 USD/mo

We subscribe via one of the funding methods in the sidebar. ☺️

first, i'm one of the admin's here, and try and let the mods of their respective communities handle the bulk of the reports. i will only step in if there's anything blatantly against the rules.

i don't care if it's left-leaning or right-leaning comments. i'm going to remove it if it's hateful, and will start with a temporary ban if it continues, and a permanent ban if it persists.

the first two rules from this instance's sidebar read:

• No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia.
• Be respectful. Everyone should feel welcome here.

does that help?

Just to be clear, I am not asking whether people would be allowed to be blatantly racist, but whether people could disagree with political movements that lean right/left without being censored? I personally think communities thrive when they can have more open, productive good-faith conversations about topics. When people get censored it usually seems to create more division and more hate in my opinion.

i agree 100%.

if you want to give me an example of what others deem "hateful", but you do not, i can tell you where i stand on it and why?

hope that answers your question!

Difference is that Lemmy is open source, anyone can start the whole thing again if things go south. Reddit is closed source, only they can run it, and they definitely don't want to release the source because they are aiming to control the market and go to stock market.

While I agree in principle with the idea that we shouldn't be freeloaders, there is another side to it.

I used to put a dozen hours a week into unpaid tech support for all comers, just because it was fun and it helped out the community. When I moved away, I started doing other things (volunteer firefighter, etc.)

My brother pours tons of work into his custom birdhouses and they are very popular. He absolutely refuses to take any compensation because it is a labour of love.

I don't expect that any one instance will remain available and viable over the long term. If things look dire or the mood strikes me, I'll look into spinning up an instance, just as part of being a good citizen. I assume that human nature will ensure that there are plenty of people like me.

I'll kick in a few bucks here and there and human nature means that there are plenty of others doing that, too.

Never underestimate the drive of someone with a hobby! Hell, I wish my hobbies ran to only a couple of hundred dollars a month!

These are all good questions and lead you to explore more about what it means to run software.

So as well as the instance (domain name / hardware server) admins, there are also the open source developers of the Lemmy software. They keep things updated and put out new features and releases. They currently have a (partial) grant from some European agencies who are making sure that open source software isn't all built and owned by American corporations.

It would be good for every instance to allocate some funding to the open source software they rely on.

I'm one of the people responsible for (currently a test Lemmy instance) news.cosocial.ca. Our main service today is our Mastodon server (cosocial.ca). We are a registered member-owned Canadian cooperative. Every member has paid at least $50 per year. We currently have volunteer moderators and server admins, our goal is to eventually pay those roles. More on our blog.

We're also here to be a resource to anyone running services in Canada, especially if you need legal or other help. /me waves at smorks

Back to keeping things running: the Lemmy software needs a bunch more features to scale. The moderation tools are very basic, there are a couple of mobile apps in development that are very early on. We should think about pooling funds and donating.

It's great to see Lemmy.ca on OpenCollective (we use it for Cosocial too). I've just donated as a $5 monthly backer. Thanks for setting this up!

Everybody is different, but I'd suggest subscribing as a backer or just tossing in a one time donation to start to support @smorks@lemmy.ca and Lemmy.ca.

I mean, this was a very real issue for every random forum site back before the internet became consolidated. In some cases people would donate to keep the servers running, in other cases the ownership gets passed on to someone that could keep servers running. At least things are way cheaper to keep running nowadays.

You can run a instance just for yourself and your friends. Nothing forces you to open it publicly.

I see Smorks has answered your question but just to follow on from what @Hotzilla said, the great thing about the software being open source is that it's totally possible for any group, for example an Indigenous arts collective, to run their own self-funded instance for their members, which can still inteact with others in the fediverse.

I would assume this whole instance would go be snapped away...im assuming it gets federated to other instances so if this server does die there is a back, but not 100% sure. earnest the owner is taking coffee donations if you want to support. Currently hes paying 100eruos not sure per month or year...