Opencollective no more, Hello Liberapay!

• Reference Open Collective Post: https://opencollective.com/reddthat/conversations/we-have-migrated-to-liberapay-4pzb7zgp#comment-1749981430361
• Our Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/reddthat
  • Which goes directly to me
• You can also do ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/reddthat
  • Which goes via Paypal (I think)
• Or send it directly via Crypto if that is your thing.
  • See the main donation page for the addresses

Summary:

It has now been 8 weeks since our last contact with our fiscal host on Opencollective and I have made the hard decision to migrate away to Liberapay.

"New" Donation Platform

When I started Reddthat I wanted to show everything that we were doing in a transparent way. We have the modlog which shows eveything that happens on Reddthat and the Lemmy-verse and I wanted to bring that to the financial side of things as well.

So I looked around at the payment processors. Patreon/etc had higher fees than what I expected and as they were donations I really didn't want to lose up-to 8% of your good will! Liberapay was the obvious choice originally but it turns out they are a platform where people can donate directly to people. Everyone needs to link their Paypal, Stripe, or EU Bank account to accept transactions on Liberapay.
This also looked a bit hard and I don't really trust Paypal, especially if out of the blue I started getting $50 "donations". Working in marketing I've head of paypal closing down accounts and holding money for ransom while you have to consistently prove you are who you are and jump through their hoops.
As I was already an "active" member of the wider Fediverse, I looked up how these services managed to accept donations and eventually stumbled upon Opencollective. This was exactly what I wanted. A open and inviting platform to handle all the money side of things while providing a truly transparent account of what is happening.

Opencollective solved all of the things I could hope for while also solving a secondary issue. Taxes. Something I have no idea about when it comes to donations, but will surely need to be up to speed on it within the next month!
After reading a few documents, you need to pick a Fiscal Host on opencollective, or prove you are a "business?" (or something like that, I don't remember) so you can become a fiscal host and accept money. This looked to be extra work on top of getting Reddthat up and running so I went looking for a local Australian fiscal host, and found one who also had 0% fees! They would accept all the donations and then transfer it back to me as a reimbursement, or I could even get them to pay invoices! This ticked all my boxes. Even if the host evidently ended charging a small 1-2% I would have been happy with that as our relationship after these last two years have been great. We even donated back to them for a few months in the early days.

~~Fast forward to today. We now have 2 months I have paid for without being reimbursed by our host. For a total of A$285.49. That would have left A$518.40 in our account for our future months~~

Update: We have managed to get all of our donations back!

Unfortunately since the payment in April I haven't heard anything from them and so we are saying Goodbye to OpenCollective and Hello to Liberapay! I'll hold out hope that they will come back online, or they've gone away for a huge holiday without internet, but this is a lesson we can all learn from.
I would like to continue using OpenCollective but the thought of losing more money the same way through another fiscal host would be too much. And the alternative of having to setup more paperwork to become our own fiscal host, and getting hit with a transaction fee for taking your donations and then "paying" myself just doesn't seem worth it. So Liberapay it is.

I've setup Liberapay and I've setup Stripe. Given them a fair amount of my details ( 😥 ). So you should be able to donate directly to me and we'll never have any of these unfortunate issues relating to other entities holding our money.

I feel like I've let you all down with ~$500+ disappearing into the ether. We can only learn from our mistakes and moving to Liberapay, Ko-Fi, or Crypto, where I hold the funds is the best way forward to ensure stability.

I'd like to remind everyone that donations are completely optional but they certainly help with it comes to a "big" instance like ours. Lemmy is growing every year and it's great to see everyone and all the things they do and the communities we have created!

And now back to the regular update.

June 2025

We've rolled out v0.9.12 for Lemmy which contained a few bugfixes as well as Peertube federation support, so now you should be able to see more peertube videos i that is your thing.

We turned 2 this month. The 6th of June was our birthday and it was an absolute banger! It was so big we all blacked out at the party and forgot it was happened! As June is a busy month for me, I made sure to renew our domain to make sure nothing happened. ;)

Since last update Lemmy World has successfully turned on the Parallel Sending which we (Reddthat) instigated way back when we started lagging behind and we all found out that sending internet traffic from one side of the world to the other sequentially might be bad. This means we no longer have need for our proxy system and it has saved us 4Euro/month (and the extra management overhead).
This also has had the same affect on our sister instances in AU/NZ allowing them to not lag behind too.

I hope you all had a great year and here's to another amazing one!

Cheers,

Tiff (& The Reddthat Admin Team)

PS. I believe I have managed to cancel all recurring donations. So if you wish to keep donating please do come over to Liberapay. <3

PPS. Did I mention that I've enabled Secret Donations for Liberapay, so I won't be able to know who you are!

April is here!

So much has happened since the last update, we've migrated to a new server, we've failed to update to a new lemmy version, automated our rollouts, fought with OVH about contracts. It's been a lot.

Strap in for story time about the upgrade, or skip till you see the break for the next section.

So good news is that we are successfully on v0.19.11.

The bad news is that we had an extended downtime.

Recently I had some extra time to completely automate the rollout process so Reddthat didn't rely solely on me being on 1 specific computer which had all the variables that was needed for a deployment.
As some people know I co-manage the lemmy-ansible repository. So it wasn't that hard to end up automating the automation. Now when a new Version is announced, I update a file/files, it performs some checks to make sure everything is okay, and i approve and roll it out. Normally we are back online within 30 seconds as the lemmy "backend" containers do checks on start to make sure everything is fine and we are good to go. Unfortunately it never came back up.

So I reverted the change thinking something was wrong with the containers and the rollout proceeded to happen again. Still not up :'( Not having my morning coffee and being a little groggy after just waking up.

Digging into it our database was in a deadlock. Two connections were attempting to do the same but different which resulted in it being locked up and not processing any queries.

Just like Lemmy World, when you are "scaling" sometimes bad things can happen. re: https://reddthat.com/post/37908617.

We had the same problem. When rolling out the update two containers ended up starting at the same time and both tried to do the migrations instead of realising one was already doing them.

After quickly tearing it all down. We started the process of only having 1 container to perform the migration and then once that had finished starting everything else we were back online.

Going forward we'll probably have to have a brief downtime for every version to ensure we don't get stuck like this again. But we are back-up and everything's working.

Now for the scheduled programming.

OVH

OVH scammed me out of the Tax on our server renewal last month. When our previously 12 month contract was coming to the end we re-evaluated our finances and were found wanting. So we ended up scaling down to a more cost-effective server and ended up being able to pay in AUD instead of USD which will allow us to stay at a single known price and not fluctuate month to month.
Unfortunately I couldn't cancel the contract. The OVH system would not let me click terminate. No matter what I did, what buttons I pressed, or how many times I spun my chair around it wouldn't let me cancel. I didn't want to get billed for another month when we were already paying for the new server. So a week before the contract ended I sent a support ticket to OVH. You can guess how that went. The first 2 responses I got from them after 4 days was "use the terminate feature". They didn't even LOOK at the screenshots clearly outlining the steps I had taken and the generic error... So I get billed for another month... and then have to threaten them with legal proceedings. They then reversed the charge. Except for the Tax. So I had to pay 10% of the fee to cancel our service. Really unhappy with OVH after this ordeal.

Automated rollouts

I spent some time after our migration ensuring that we have another system setup which will be able to rollout updates. So we are not dependant on just me and my one random computer :P All was going very well until an upgrade with database migrations happened. We'll be working on that soon to make sure we don't have unforeseen downtime.

Final Forms

Now that the dust has settled and we've performed the migrations starting next month I'll probably go back to our quarterly updates unless something insane happens. (IE: Lemmy drops v1 👀 )

We also modified our "Reddthat Community and Support" community to be a Local Only community. The original idea for the community was to have a place where only reddthat could chat, but back when we started out that wasn't a thing! So now if you want to voice your opinion to other Reddthat users please feel free too knowing other instances won't come in and derail the conversation.

As a reminder we have many ways to donate if you are able and feel like it! A recurring donation of $5 is worth more to me than a once of $60 donation. Only because it allows me to forecast the year and work out when we need to do donation drives or relax knowing everything in it's current state will be fine.

• Open Collective (preferred)
• Kofi
• Litecoin Direct
• Monero Direct (preferred)

Cheers,

Tiff

We just successfully upgraded to the latest Lemmy version, 0.9.10, probably the last before the v1 release.

This addresses some of the PM spam that everyone has been getting. Now when that user is banned and we remove content it also removes the PMS. So hopefully you won't see them anymore!

Over the next couple days will be planning for our migration to our new server as our current server's contract has ended. I expect the down time to last for about an hour, if not shorter. You'll be able to follow updates for the migration by our status page at https://status.reddthat.com/

Normally this update would be a week in advance and more nicely formatted that turns out the contract ends on the 25th and I don't want to get charged for another month at a higher rate when I just purchased the new server.

See you on the other side,

Tiff

EDIT:

22 Mar 2025 02:42: I'm going to start the migration in 5 mins (@ 3:00)

22 Mar 2025 03:01: that was the fastest migration I've ever done. pre-seeding the server and Infra as Code is amazing!

We've turned off our crypt donation p2pool (as no-one was using it), and two of our frontends, alexandrite and next (for the same reasons)

Time to celebrate with some highly accurate Australian content:

Hello Reddthat! We are back for another update on how we are tracking. It's been a while eh? Probably because it was such smooth sailing!

In the middle of February we updated Lemmy to v0.19.9 which contained some fixes for federating between Mastodon and Lemmy so hopefully we will see less spam and more interaction from the larger mastodon community. While that in of itself is a nice fix, the best fix is the recent thumbnail fix! Thumbnails now have extra logic around generating them and now have a higher chance of actually being created! Let us know if you think there has been a change over the past month-ish.

Budget & Upcoming Migration

Reddthat has been lucky to have such a great community that has helped us stay online for over a year and if you can believe it, in just a few more months it will be 2 years, if we can make it.

Our costs have slowly increased over the years as you can all see by our transactions on OpenCollective (https://opencollective.com/reddthat). We've managed to reduce some costs in our S3 hosting after it balooned out and bring it down to a more manageable level. Unfortunately as well, the current economic issues have resulted in the Australian dollar slipping further and as we pay everything in USD or EUR it has resulted in slightly higher costs on a month-to-month basis..

Our best opportunity to keep online for the foreseeable future is to downsize our big server from a 32GB ram instance to a 16GB ram instance which will still provide enough memory that we will be able to function as we currently do while not affecting us in a meaningful way.

This means we'll need to reassess if running all our different front ends are useful, or do we only choose a few? Currently I am looking to turn off next and alexandrite. If you are a regular user of these frontends and prefer them please let me know as from our logs these are the least used while also take up the most resources. (Next still has bugs regarding caching every single image).

We can get a vps for about ~A$60-70 per month which will allow us to still be as fast as we are now while saving 40% off our monthly costs. This will bring us to nearly 90% funded by the community. We'll still be slowly "losing" money from our open collective backlog but we'll have at least another 6 months under our belt, if not 12 months! (S3 costs and other currency conversion not withstanding).

All of this will happen in late March early April as we will need to make sure we do it before the current contract is up so we don't get billed for the next month. Probably the 29th/30th of I don't fall asleep too early on those days.
It'll probably take around 45mins to 60mins but if I get unlucky maybe 2 hours.

Age Restriction

Effective immediately everyone on Reddthat needs to be 18 years old and futher interaction on the platform confirms you are over the age of 18 and agree with these terms.

If you are under the age of 18 you will need to delete your account under Settings

This has also been outlined in our signup form that has been updated around the start of February.

Australian & UK Policy Changes

It seems the UK has also created their own Online Safety Act that makes it nearly impossible for any non-corporation to host a website with user generated content (USG). This is slightly different to the Australian version where it specifically targets Social Media websites.

Help?

I would also like your help!
To keep Reddthat online, and to help comply with these laws, if you see content or user accounts which are under the age of 18 please report the account/post/content citing that the user might be under the age of 18.
We will then investigate and take action if required.

Thanks everyone

As always keep being awesome and having constructive conversations!

Cheers,

Tiff!

PS. Like what we are doing? Keep us online for another year by donating via our OpenCollective or other methods (crypto, etc) via here

Hello Reddthat-thians!

As always here is our semi-whenever there is news update. I would, as always like to thank you all for being here and for the kind support we received last time I made an update.

We hit a few couple of milestones this last quarter:

• Our first BTC transaction was received! Thank you anonymous!
• Lemmy released two versions (which we have yet to update too, more below)
• I only restarted the services once the whole quarter as I thought we were down/stuck.

Lemmy 0.19.7

The latest update brings some fixes to Lemmy as well as ~~new features such as Private/Invite only communities. I can't wait to see what this does to help people find safe spaces and to self regulate.~~ Edit: that's in 0.20.0. The only new features (worth talking about imo) are parallel sending and allowing people to have 1000 characters in their bio.
This update is not live yet as the update requires a 30-60 minute database update that I want to test on a backup to make sure we can safely update. Other big instances have already done the update and most things went successfully so I'm confident that we can update without much fuss but I'd like to actually enjoy my holidays rather than spending 4 hours debugging db migrations! So, testing first.

Users

Something I think we struggle with is our proposition. As we have an opinionated view on what our community should be which doesn't always resonate when trying to sign up. With "only" 100 users active daily compared to other servers with over 1k it puts into perspective that not everyone agrees with our policies, but there are certainly people who do!

As such I'm open to ideas on growing our userbase or ideas on rephrasing our signup page, and sidebar.

Australian Social Media Laws

Here is the biggest news. Last week the Australian Government passed a new law that requires Social Media to no longer be accessible for kids under the age of 16. As such we will need to design a system & possibly modify Lemmy to be compliant with these laws.

I will not debate whether this is good or bad, because at the end of the day, we only have a few options: comply with these laws, don't comply and turn off reddthat, sell / handoff to another admin.
This has been a fun side project for me and I want to continue it. As such I'm looking into ways to comply with the local laws to ensure that Australian minors are blocked.

For Reddthat, this law requires social media to take "reasonable" steps to ensure children under the age of 16 are not be given an account. They do not define what reasonable means and leave it up to the social media platforms to define it. Really helpful for those indie social media platforms...

Unfortunately, like myself, I was thinking that we might technically not be defined as a social media platform thus skirting around the rule. The law defines a social media platform as any site whose primary or significant purpose is to connect 2 or more users, allows end-users to link to or interact with other end-users, and that allows end-users to post content.
So Lemmy, Mastodon, Blusky et al will be affected.

Researching it more leads to the idea which puts the onus on social media companies to continually verify accounts, so they take a proactive step to verify accounts that are believed to be accessed by minors under 16. Thus you need to prove you are above 16 years old. The cherry on top? You are not allowed to use a government issued ID to do it.
Thinking back to when you were 16 years old, what forms of identification did you have? A driver's licence? Maybe a passport? A school ID card? The last one (school ID) would be the only valid id you could use to verify yourself that isn't government issued in this instance. And good luck if you don't go to school anymore and started in the workforce when your 16.

Needless to say this is going to be a recurring theme over the next year and I will keep you all informed about it with our updates.

Future Features

A general outline of what I'm hoping to achieve is more controls in Lemmy to:

• have accounts in a 'monitored' state
• have a way to customise approval processes
• have accounts use a trust rating based on age, post/comment numbers, etc.
  • this would help with spam as well (obviously this would need a lot of factors)
• have automod built in (or actually setup correctly for us)

Obviously these are things that will need Lemmy development to help facilitate and I'll be creating a few issues over the weeks once I've fleshed out what a solution might look like.
If you have ideas please share! let's start the conversation on what the processes would look like to help solve our issues.

Financials

Thanks to the big donation drive from last time I posted we are still looking healthy enough in the financials to last until May next year! Which is good as our server plan renews in April. At that time we will be downgrading to a smaller instance as we may have over exaggerated when purchasing last April. We'll obviously know more closer to April next year about our financials and what we can afford to ensure we are cost neutral (if possible!).

Our LemmyWorld proxy also is an extra cost that we never budgeted for and has been ticking away successfully. Maybe by April LW will have upgraded to >0.19.5 which will give us parallel sending allowing us to remove the proxy.

Our object storage is humming along but costs are creaping up. I'll be doing an audit and possible look into doing a cost analysis to see if other object storage solutions would be cheaper. But for less than $20/m it's probably not even worth my time...

As a reminder we have many ways to donate if you are able. A recurring donation of $5 is worth more to me than a once of $60 donation. Only because it allows me to forecast the year and work out when we need to do donation drives or relax knowing everything in it's current state will be fine.

• Open Collective (preferred)
• Kofi
• Litecoin Direct
• Monero Direct (preferred)

Note: while you still can transfer me Bitcoin, I have removed it as an option because of the current transaction fees. Monero or Litecoin offer transaction fees as low as $0.005 so they are the preferred options compared to the $5 transaction fee of Bitcoin.

Conclusion

You are awesome. Posting, Commenting, and interacting with communities on Reddthat or through Reddthat makes it enjoyable every time to write these updates. So keep being awesome, even if you are a lurker!

If I were not hosting in Australia I would still be required to conform to laws if I were to allow Australian people to use Reddthat. Blocking all of Aus would be an option. But we need to ask ourselves does that fall under our values or ideals? (No obviously). Neither does requiring people to verify they are over a certain age. But we'll see what's to become.
This is the same as how CPPA or GDPR are still enforcable while we are all the way on the other side of the world.
This doesn't require a knee jerk reaction but requires serious thinking, whiteboarding and well thought out communication.

As always,
Cheers,

Tiff

PS Happy Holidays!