A few quick notes on discussions the administrator team has had, since we've fielded a lot of questions in these particular fields. We're posting this both for transparency and to help us limit the load of having to respond to each of you individually.
We would like to become an official nonprofit at some point, but there is a cost associated with this, we are not lawyers, and we might need to change where/how we collect donations to do so.
We've upgraded the server approximately 7 times now. We're trying to balance fiscal responsibility with server costs. We are aware that digital ocean isn't the cheapest server and we are trying to be conservative with estimates and give ourselves extra runtime at whatever tier we are on. We're also hoping that the upcoming lemmy version will solve a lot of our CPU-bound issues.
We are aware of the following bugs:
the "report created" indicator flashes in the bottom left corner for some users randomly, even non-moderator users
sometimes, briefly or without a refresh, the username in the top corner will not be your own; as far as we can tell this is purely cosmetic and is not a security issue
sometimes the post you're in changes to another post for no clear reason
I know most users here are against monetization, but I think that a simple Shopify storefront with behaw merch would go a long way to help entice more people to make a monitory donation. I would love a beehaw mug, stickers, and maybe even a shirt or a hat.
Good monetization: giving people tote bags, pens, t-shirts, stickers, coffee mugs, or window clings "in exchange for a donation" like PBS does.
Bad monetization: selling the ability to downvote posts, selling avatars, selling the ability to have your post stickied, and all the other ways shitty forums sell prestige
I really like this idea, and I could even something that artists do on SoundCloud where an album costs $5 minimum but you can write in your own price above and beyond that initial $5.
I'd happily pick up a sticker and tack on a donation.
Thank you for all the hard work! Hopefully things will eventually slow down and less pressure will be on your shoulders. This community is more relaxed and feels like a casual hang out if anything and it’s definitely a breath of fresh air. I’m glad to be here and I’ll be sticking around for sure
I mean I have a 10gbps home connection with 1gbps backup and a server rack! No but really, I came from enterprise architecture and built some massive global pubsub networks (on the tune of 900m users/devices). Be happy to give a hand on the infra side if needed!
if you'd like to chip in please join the discord or matrix- as a general statement we are not looking to have people self host beehaw for us at this point in time
Thanks for all the hard work. It's seen and appreciated.
On the existing bugs/issues, are these issues with the Lemmy code in general or with the specific implementation here? Do you all need help triaging or finding root cause of issues? I am a test engineer and might be able to help out with digging into finding problems.
I'm sure the Lemmy developers would like help triaging and finding root cause of issues! Here's where you can find their repos : https://github.com/LemmyNet/
Beehaw.org is run off Digital Ocean, they currently have 16 vCPUs and 32 gigs of ram. They plan on hopefully scaling back down once the whole reddit migration situation has calmed down.
Lol, because I'll be spinning up an instance this coming weekend with some QoL changes that I'd like to see, but don't think would be merged in (route schema for posts as i dont like {url/post/{post_id}
Seems like a lot of instances are being hit hard today. The mod (Ruud) at lemmy.world has been posting about his server upgrades as well. Here's his latest update: https://lemmy.world/comment/102234
Thanks for trying to figure this out. I can’t imagine home much time this is requiring of you, and bet this isn’t what you thought you’d be doing in June.
Appreciate all the work you do in keeping this instance running! I haven't donated yet, but plan to do so in July, in the hopes that operating costs settle out after the the final impact of 3rd party app closure on the 30th.
Thanks for all the work you guys are doing. It's really heartening to see someone trying to pick up the pieces with the mindset of not tolerating the intolerant.
Sorry I am a busybody. For what it's worth: Pair. I am an ex-sysadmin and I know a mess of people who worked for Pair and say good things about them. Their physical and customer service is excellent. I've had/have multiple accounts with them, some for 501c3 orgs, and never had any major problems with them. (Nothing is perfect.)
Goofy question 'cuz I'm new here, but I noticed the LemmyNet GitHub has a dockerfile showing the backend is compiled against musl. Is there still an enormous performance difference between modern glibc malloc and musl? I get it, there's fun in cramming image sizes down as much as possible, but in my experience the advantages of musl disintegrate pretty quickly once you get past the "interesting toy" stage of things.
I don't know how evolved your ops platform is at this point but if you can canary in some glibc built pods/containers you might find an appreciable difference.
I set up a recurring donation today, it's small but I hope it helps. I'm so glad I found this place, thanks for having me. You guys are amazing, the world is better for having people like you in it!
most likely (we also want to be a co-op i think, which may or may not be possible with that designation)? but we're not experts on any of this and it's such a far-in-the-future question relative to all the stuff we have going on now so it's tough to even answer that definitively.
I think this kind of thing will only scale long term if the user base is willing to contribute something. Even a few bucks a month would go a long way if a large enough percentage did it. Ok, I'll get off my soapbox now. 🙂