Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It’s been an eventful year but, despite fate’s best efforts, we’re still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)
Today marks the one year anniversary of our humble little instance. It’s been an eventful year but, despite fate’s best efforts, we’re still here. So go us! (or boo us if you think we suck)
How did that turn out for you?
Well feddit.uk is celebrating it’s first birthday, which wasn’t looking like a certainty for a while. We were pretty much at the point of no-return when the original Admin gave us access to everything so we could move it off to a new server. Since then we secured the financial future of the Instance and everything is bobbing along just fine.
Oh, that’s cool. So you’re running it based on a cooperative or a nonprofit organization now? Same as we intend for feddit.de , just that our admin isn’t reachable, and therefore we can’t transfer data. We’d have to start anew. Also, we don’t know yet which new hostname to choose.
I suppose a bit of both - it’s all funded through Open Collective and our first round of fundraising brought in enough to cover the year’s worth of hosting and domains with monthly donations topping it up (I wasn’t sure what to expect but everyone’s generosity exceeded it).
That’s the position we were in but it does seem like they will pop up again, so the data isn’t gone.
If you want any help, hit us up on Matrix as it sounds like we’ve walked the path you are on.
Oh indeed - too many good names. We decided it by a quick show of hands on Matrix.
Hi, German guy from the matrix room here. The state of the art is that we made a poll about our new instance name (probably feddit.org) while being in contact with the Austrian fediverse.foundation, we plan an instance for the whole German-speaking area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland). Great to hear that we don’t walk alone, you’ll hear from us if there’s something new.
Btw. am I right that your annual server costs are £1,026?
.org is definitely a power move and opening the scope to German-speakers is a good idea - not that they weren’t welcome before but it makes everyone feel included.
Cheers. I’ll keep an eye out.
The outgoings currently include paying me back for earlier hosting - our current hosting is running at €40.68/mo (around £35) which works out at €488.16/yr (about £420). That’s for a decent server that currently has plenty of spare capacity, plus a separate storage box in another country. I am happy to share the relevant details if you drop me a note on Matrix.
Sounds affordable for us, nothing we couldn’t possibly get together.
That’s the great thing - you can set very reasonable donation levels (we have one for £1/month) and it doesn’t require a need a lot of people to chip in for you to get the monthly hosting costs covered, without eating into your “war chest” which can help get you through any “shocks” like another Rexxit or having to change hosting or something unforeseen (making the news, some other social media enshittification, etc.).
That price point makes other, topic-specific instances (which I am a big fan of), very viable.