First up… this is not a call for donations.
Without going into the personal details as to why: I don’t have the energy to give this place the attention it needs, and I’m no longer willing to cover the majority of running costs.
I don’t have a fully fledged solution to this, and don’t have the energy to come up with one. The best I can come up with is I hand the reins over to Nath, and some sort of community funding is set up to cover costs.
If anyone knows of above board methods to establish a crowd funded piggy bank for something like this, I’m all ears.
Does something like liberapay work? I dont know much about it but see it on a lot of Foss repos
I’m not technical enough to know what to do but would contribute
Same here
Me too.
I think I’ve donated once… as enjoyers of FOSS we really should be better at paying for what we previously expected corporations to front the bill for. Thanks for all of your work.
I totally agree. Actually I think pretty much everyone agrees. It’s just a bit tricky, because it is not what most people are use to in their daily lives.
I mean, in most cases people seek out the highest quality products at the lowest prices. Lower cost is basically always what people aim for, as long as the quality is high enough. But with FOSS and other free services, you get the product for free… so that’s a win right? Zero cost. What are you paying for? It needs a totally different mindset. We need to think of ourselves as part of a community working together and sharing resources - not a bunch of independent people only making trades for our own self-interest. For that, I think transparency about what funding is needed and where it is going is very helpful.
Really sorry to hear that, best wishes to you.
I would suggest opencollective, it’s worked really well for us.
Thank you for everything. I’m sorry I haven’t donated regularly. When a decision is made I will.
OpenCollective is built around transparent crowd funding / expense management.
Thank you for all you’ve put into this.
I’ve used this a couple times seems a legit method.
Kofi has worked well for me as well.
Well I’m only an idiot but I use this everyday so if we have a solution I’m willing to contribute
appreciate all the hard work Lodion! 💪
Aussie Zone is one of my most visited sites along with OCAU and Whirlpool
Open Collective is pretty good, it could be used. Good on ya for passing it to Nate rather than just letting it die, but it’ll be sad to have you gone
Lodion, first, thank you. You’ve shown me a genuinely far healthier side of the internet. A side I never knew existed up until just over three years ago. Thanks to you setting up this instance, I’ve learned a lot more than I ever thought I would about the web and social media.
Secondly, you’ve created a community here, i’ve always thought it’d be good to see you engage more socially, but understood you were very engaged in different ways and perhaps not interested in that side of things anyway, fair enough. But, for my piece at least, I hope you stick around and enjoy more of the social aspect of this community you’ve been so instrumental in creating. :)
Nath, I hope the transition goes smoothly. I always understood funding was a quiet issue in the background, and I will be there to help with costs. Lets make the funding of this place a sustainable aspect that you don’t have to worry about.
Any other help I can jump in to aupport you with, you know where to find me. :)
Hello everyone,
First up, this site was Lodion’s baby. We are all here because of him. He decided a Lemmy instance for Australians needed to exist, mostly free of the dramas of the wider Internet. He set up the whole show and like the Field of Dreams, we all came. I was just a regular user sign-up. I didn’t know he had set any of this up, I was just a Reddit exile when they brought in their API changes that both killed third-party apps, and essentially began the whole “We’re going to sell all your comments to AI companies”. Lodion and I go way back more than 20 years, and when I spotted he was the admin, I volunteered to help out with running the site.
It’s you. All of you. You all have made this community what it is. Take you guys away and it’s all just a bunch of files on a disk and an empty database. Together, we have all built the site that I still see as an oasis that connects to the globe, but you can dip in as little or as much as you like. Even in Lemmy space, Aussie.Zone is not a huge instance. We’ve never tried to be. I still don’t especially want us to be. I’d rather grow by 10 regulars per month who are all chill and easy to help out than see an influx of 20,000 people who would cause a whole pile of new problems that we just aren’t equipped to deal with. I’ve been the more visible of the two of us on the site, but in terms of “management”, my load is maybe 15 minutes per day. Which is great! Because I don’t always have much more than that to give on any given day. 90% of the time, I’m just a regular user with that little red “A” next to my name - nothing more.
Lodion and I have been chatting about him stepping away for a while now. I’m willing to take on the stuff he’s been doing - but he’s been funding the site out of pocket to the tune of around $60ish per month (I haven’t seen the raw finances yet, but the last time Lodion mentioned it, the site was costing something in the ballpark of $100 per month to run) for about a year now - and I am not in a place where I can do that. For what this site is, $100/month is a bargain!
So, I disagree with Lodion. This is going to end up being a call for donors. We (all of us) are going to need to find that money. Frankly, I easily get $5/month value from the site - and there’s 5% all by itself. I believe we can find 20 people who would chip in that much. Frankly, I reckon we could find twice that without getting whiny. Ads are off the table. I hate them. Users hate them. Our users are all smart enough to run adblocks anyway, so I’d only annoy prospective people who aren’t members. I have a couple of ideas for incentives for donors, to hopefully make donating more attractive.
There are a couple of things I could use a hand with, and I might take a few of you up on these offers to help. Things like monitoring finances and reporting incoming/outgoing costs. The Molly project also needs help as well. Stuff I haven’t really had the chance to prioritise.
Before Lodion fades away, I would love to see this thread turn into a bit of a love fest. Shit’s real in his world right now - and a bombardment of love from us all, telling him how much of a difference this site makes to us all, and how grateful we are to him for what he built is in order.
Thank you, mate. I know very well that you don’t personally feel like you have done all that much to make this site what it is - and in some aspects, that is true. But it also wouldn’t be what it is without you. I have laughed, cried, but most importantly, I have found a community here that I love. This instance has been a daily part of my life for over three years now, and perhaps you didn’t make all that - but you made that possible. 100% you. Truly, thank you. ❤️
Please, when you’ve sussed it out, provide a link to a donation page <3
Yeh. Chuck up a link and I’ll happily chip in $5 a month.
The Molly project?
Do you mean this: https://mollyproject.org/
Pretty sure it was just the age verification stuff.
Oh right! Yeah, that would make sense. Although i don’t remember that having a name.
Big thanks Lodion for setting this place up and running it. I understand the mental and financial load it brings. No judgement for stepping away. I hope whatever is going on in your life is made easier by doing so ❤️
This community is certainly a pleasant corner of the internet which is a true rarity.
Nath, big thanks too for putting your hand up for running things. If it’s getting too much and you need a break or helping hand don’t keep quiet. Appreciate the way you’ve both done the post.
I’ve got strong dislike for small monthly payments but if I can do a once off I’ll throw some dollarydoos at it and probably again in a year or two. Please announce when a suitable option is chosen.
In terms of covering costs, Lemmy.nz has had to do this since earlier this year (we borrowed hosting before this). Making it visible is important, and people will donate if they are aware but as our LemmyNZ census questionaire shows every time, there are a significant chunk of people that don’t even know how to donate!
I’ve been doing quarterly financial updates to make the costs and donations visible. Each post has led to a string of donations, not only from our users. One update had a $100 shortfall and there were hundreds donated in the following days!
So I highly recommend doing some sort of regular post so everyone knows where you’re at financially and as a reminder to people who want to donate but forget.
Hey hey, firstly, a huge thanks to you and Lodion for everything you’ve done with Aussie.Zone. I’d really love to see it continue.
I’m more than happy to chip in financially, but I also have some time and would be keen to offer some practical help.
I noticed you mentioned needing assistance with the finances and reporting. That’s something I could potentially help with, along with documenting the existing setup and working through what a sustainable operating model might look like.
I’ve got experience with planning, governance and financial modelling, as well as a fair bit of hands-on experience with self-hosted services and infrastructure. I’m certainly not a Lemmy expert, but I’m comfortable working through the technical side.
I wouldn’t want to create more work for you, particularly while you’re managing the transition, but if that sounds useful I’d be very happy to help.
And Lodion, thank you for creating this place. It’s genuinely something special. ❤️
@shlee@aus.social has been experimenting with a funding union, we could hook into that as the primary funding source. I’m not sure how developed it is.
Shlee seems to have some experience with community funding, the link below is from a week ago at the GenerOZity raffle at PAXAUS 26.
Posters Union is the funding organisation shlee has been setting up to help cover server costs.
We could talk more to shlee about the concept and join in, or use the example as inspiration.
Yeah. Shlee is a bit of an expert on fundraising for community projects. He has taken on the funding and maintenance of a few smaller mastodon servers after their original admins were no longer able; and he is the chief fundraising guy for pixelfed, the fediverse alternative to instagram. I’m on aus.social, and I’ve donated to the Posters Union a couple of times. (Although I think it might be renaming to Posters Guild, due to some minor legal pushback when registering it as an official charity or something.) And as you (Gorgritch) point out, he is a real-life person who also does various charity fundraising in the physical world amongst real people outside of the internet.
So yeah, probably it would be worth contacting him for ideas and suggestions.
Sorry to hear buddy. Best of luck
Thanks for all you’ve been doing.
Thanks lodion, you made an amazing place :D
