Discussion
Hey #UnionPlace family! I need your help.
We've got about 230 active users. The cloud hosting bill for the instance is a bit over $500/mo. We're down to about $100/mo of income from people-who-are-not-me.
That means I'm out of pocket $400+/mo to keep this going, and that's not super sustainable, even with my employer's non-profit matching cutting that in half.
I don't want to shut down the instance, but I can't keep up this level of funding either. What does the community think?
1/n
Are there ways we might be able to coordinate occasional/quarterly/annual donations better?
Monthly autopayments are a bit of a luxery for folks with reliable disposable income, BUT a few bucks in the hat when its possible has been a grassroots way.
How do we know when piecemeal donations pay off?
Could we be having a party or little event periodically to celebrate and organize microfunds? Something unfancy and to the point, maybe.
@tim Firstly: I can probably up my donation. Secondly: is there a means of donation that sends more money to you/the server and less towards the transaction fees?
@matthubbs directly via Stripe is probably the lowest total fees.
@tim I might be biased, because I work for a small datacenter and hosting provider, but have you considered getting out of the cloud? $500 a month for 230 users seems excessive, but I’m not super familiar with the scale of hosting a mastodon instance. Also, getting out of the cloud (especially if it’s one of the big 3) is a good idea for a whole bunch of other reasons.
@keelan Mastodon is a pig, sadly.
We could try a migration to masto.host, which (might) drop our hosting costs. Our database is pretty big, though, so unless we trim out a lot of remote history (which we probably COULD do, but isn't well-supported), it'd actually wind up not that much cheaper.
More people could donate... https://www.laborunionnetworking.org/donate/
We could try to find some "corporate" sponsorship perhaps from a friendly union organization (if you know of one, my ears are open!)
2/n
Or, well, that's about my list of options, other than shutting down or me continuing to fund things. I've done what I can to control costs with our current cloud hosting, and I just don't see a lot of squeezing I can do without sacrificing usability, or backups, and a service without backups seems ... pointless ... to me as an SRE. :)
Thoughts/feedback from the community welcome!
3/3
If there were some fun handdrawn lineart you could have about donation info/reminders, would you want that sent somewhere to be reviewed for possible use?
My profession is in other places, but I can draw hands.
@lightbocks sure, if you have ideas I'd be happy to take a look. Images to get attention are definitely a valuable tool. Feel free to DM me or email to tim [at] union dot place. Thanks!
@tim First, I want to thank Tim for all the work he's put into Union.Place. I think we should explore every viable option; both to reduce hosting costs and to possibly obtain sponsorship. That said. I want to say this in as gentle a possible way, and with complete understanding that all our circumstances are our own, but…500/230 is not an insurmountable number. I'd encourage anyone who can donate…please consider it.
@tim 💔
In your position, I'd try to find a union to sponsor the instance, with you as the 'manager'
The $$/mo would be chump change for AFSCME's national org, & their sponsorship would give them reason to promote their #Fediverse platform (i.e., expand # of potential donors)
Install bonfire.cafe
Get the full app experience
@tim $6000/230=$26 per user. That seems like a small price to pay to use the server, and I'm not flush with cash.
If I forgot to donate last year, I'll rectify that now.
You shouldn't have to pay for this alone.