Hi all, I'm relatively new to this instance but reading through the instance docs I found:
Donations are currently made using snowe’s github sponsors page. If you get another place to donate that is not this it is fake and should be reported to us.
Going to the sponsor page we see the following goal:
@snowe2010's goal is to earn $200 per month
pay for our 📫 SendGrid Account: $20 a month 💻 Vultr VPS for prod and beta sites: Prod is $115-130 a month, beta is $6-10 a month 👩🏼 Paying our admins and devops any amount ◀️ Upgrade tailscale membership: $6-? dollars a month (depends on number of users) Add in better server infrastructure including paid account for Pulsetic and Graphana. Add in better server backups, and be able to expand the team so that it's not so small.
Currently only 30% of the goal to break-even is being met. Please consider setting up a sponsorship, even if it just $1. Decentralized platforms are great but they still have real costs behind the scenes.
Note: I'm not affiliated with the admin team, just sharing something I noticed.
The whole idea to check the donations came from stumbling upon this post which discussed costs per user. Even $1/mo is quite a bit more than the average user cost. So $2 isn't so measly when putting it into that perspective!
Things should be put into perspective. The cost per user is actually the fixed monthly cost of operating an instance divided by the average number of active users.
In the discussion you linked to, there's a post on how Lemmy.ml costs $80/month + domain name to serve ~2.4k users. If we went through opex/users metric, needlessly expensive setups with low participation would be a justification to ask for more donations.
Regardless, this is a good reminder that anyone can self-host their own Lemmy instance. Some Lemmy self-host posts go as far as to claim a Lemmy instance can be run on a $5/month virtual private server from the likes of scaleway.