Beehaw Support

Registrations themself don't factor into the infrastructure cost of Beehaw. What does matter, is number of concurrent users and maximizing the efficiency of the service, to handle the load better.

I would rather move to a lower cost provider than to just stop all registrations due to server load. Helix, Remington and I are working hard to increasing the performance of Lemmy and our backend to handle more users. We don't want to or expect to keep throwing money at this problem.

In the event that the runway did end up shortening for whatever reason, do you think it’s likely that registrations would be put on hold as a way of capping expansion until more funding could be secured?

i'll defer to @Penguincoder@beehaw.org and @Lionir@beehaw.org here but i think it's more likely we'd just switch to a cheaper host or something (which we're already probably going to do).[^1] most of our issues if that runway gets shorter presumably won't be with people signing up so much as just general traffic.

[^1]: Digital Ocean is fine for most of our purposes but it's on the expensive end long-term and we hit the point of diminishing returns with our last upgrade. we already don't use most of what we're paying for, strictly speaking--it really only has some side benefits it shouldn't in the first place because Lemmy is weird.

Same, good to see all the donations!

Apologies if this has been asked elsewhere, I haven’t seen it: How are the core team compensated for their work on the platform?

short answer: we aren't.

long answer: we extremely aren't. the person who has financially benefited the most from running the site is the person who makes our icons, because we try to pay a fair wage to people whose labor we use that isn't our own. the site quite literally would not be able to function if we were compensated for doing this--on our end-of-month balance we'd fund about a week of work total between all of us, assuming the quite-low-by-software-standards $15/hr wage.

I appreciate that it’s a passion project, but I’m sure y’all have bills to pay.

can't speak for the other mods but i currently benefit from not having a job and not technically having bills to pay. i assume the others have jobs which cover their expenses but as you can probably infer this means we can't do this as a full time job which makes it vital it doesn't become one

I was so worried this was going to be a "We desperately need financial support" and was pleasantly surprised to find it to be "More financial support would be extremely beneficial to ensure continued success, but things look okay." Once I know what my month's finances are, I will be signed up for an annual donation

Initially, yes. Ongoing, no. Lots of various tuning, caching, performance checks, some code changes to Lemmy itself for our usecase, etc.

I see that there’s a “Support Lemmy” option over there, but is there a way to specifically send a donation to Beehaw, or does it just go to Lemmy in general?

it's the post's submission link here, and can always be found on the front page sidebar

Noting that this "Support Lemmy" option does not send us any money. It's for the two main developers of Lemmy.

What’s the hive? A matrix instance?

yes, for internal stuff/as our main base of admin-to-admin communication and for our Matrix-using mods. we'd do this on Lemmy with a private community or something but as far as we're aware we literally can't (there appears to be no functionality for something like that, to our chagrin, and i can't imagine it's high on the priority list so we'll have to make do)

There is unfortunately no Merch 😓

Maybe later but this is pretty hard to do and we're spread way too thin to do more at the moment.

We've discussed this in the past, and it's something we're open to the idea of, but we'd like for the merch to be sustainable and to provide resources for people that need it, rather than large companies. If someone on this website happens to run a small business making some kind of merchandise and can handle the volume they'd likely see, we're more than open to working with them, but it's way down low in terms of priorities.

Hetzner is also nice

other admins can fill in with more specifics but just based on the dashboard:

16 vCPUs / 32GB / 160GB Disk