We're Growing, But We Need Your Help!
Fosstodon is going from strength to strength, but in order to keep that up, we need your help.
Hey there folks, Kev here. The team and I wanted to give you an update on where we are in terms of our growth and what the future looks like for Fosstodon.
You’re probably aware that we recently decided to go to an invite only model for the instance. This was for a number of reasons, but mainly to control the spam accounts we were receiving.
This was a gamble as we weren’t sure if this would put any legitimate new members off. We’re happy to report that our gamble worked. The change has had a dramatic impact on the spam accounts we’re seeing, and therefore the amount of reports we’re having to process. We’re still seeing steady growth too, so all in all this was win/win we think.
With more growth comes more cost though. Last year we moved away from CloudFlare for our CDN, and we moved to BunnyCDN. This was a great move - Bunny provides a fantastic service, and we managed to get out from under the monolith that is CloudFlare.
We also stood up a Mattermost server for the team to collaborate in, and for us to share ideas, feedback and general chit-chat with our Patrons.
The problem
Problem is, hosting a large (and growing) instance like Fosstodon, using CDN services like Bunny and having web servers running applications like Mattermost all cost money.
So we earn approximately $130/month from Patreon and Liberpay, but we pay out $115/month in hosting charges (breakdown here). This leaves a huge $15/month in lieu, and that’s assuming we don’t have a spike in traffic, or need to increase our hosting resources.
We need your help
As many of you know, any spare funds we have over our 6 month float get accumulated and donated to open source projects. So we’re not trying to line our own pockets here - I just want to make that clear up front.
If you find Fosstodon useful, and want to see it continue to grow from strength to strength, it would be AMAZING if you could throw a donation our way to help keep the lights on.
We don’t expect anyone to donate and we will NEVER put Fosstodon behind a paywall, but any help from our amazing community would be greatly appreciated.
We currently have 19,000 users on Fosstodon, and 53 Patrons. That’s 0.27%. If we could get to 1%, we would be set for the long term.
What if we go into the red?
Well, I don’t know to be honest. We would have to discuss it as a team. But we do have a float of cash to keep the lights on, and I’m sure that if funds dried up, we as a team would put our hands in our pockets to keep the lights on for a period of time. Most of the team are already Patrons too.
How can I chip in?
I’m so glad you asked! There are a few ways to help support us financially - Patron, Liberapay and Paypay are all available.
Our Patron levels start at just $1/month. To reiterate again - there is absolutely no expectation for financial support, but if you can help, we would be ever so grateful.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns, please feel free to get in touch with one of the team.