I’ve seen other instances do this, so I figured I might as well too. Right now the instance is hosted on a relatively medium sized VPS with object storage. Lemmy uses very little resources, so I run some personal stuff on the server as well (like a screenshot hoster, blog, etc) but if I need to upgrade I can eventually.

VPS: $13.99

Object storage: as of right now it is $2.20 (and growing, slowly but surely)

I’m not opposed to donations, but it’s not required. The biggest cost is likely going to be object storage more and more.

  • gabe [he/him]OPMA
    2·
    1 year ago

    Aw thank you! I’m honestly so happy with the vibes this community has so far. I saw that literature.cafe was available as a domain for super cheap and was planning on getting a VPS anyway, so I decided to set things up for a personal way to tinker with lemmy and this is where we ended up. I’m not super focused on growth, I have advertised a little bit but it’s not really a focus of mine. I have a mentality of “If you build it, people will come” when it comes to these kind of communities. More than a few people have already migrated gradually from larger instances away to this instance as it matches their interests, which is quite a lot given this instance is only a few weeks old. I have considered reaching out to some of the book communities on lemmy.world as a “hey we exist if you wanna be less reliant on lemmy.world” kinda thing but I dunno how well that would be received…

    Tangent aside, I made a liberapay as a thing to have. No goals are set for it, but obviously if you wanna contribute it’s appreciated. I will also likely be making a “break the glass” admin account, just as a backup for someone to come in and make sure the site doesn’t fall apart if I ever go AWOL (which I don’t have plans on doing, but life has a way of surprising us unfortunately sometimes so its a good idea to be prepared…)

    Heres the liberapay, just click the image

    • CaptObvious
      2·
      1 year ago

      It is, indeed, a good idea to be prepared. An old friend used to say “I’m not planning to step in front of a bus, but one never knows.” :D

      Thanks for setting up a way for us to chip in from time to time.

      • gabe [he/him]OPMA
        2·
        1 year ago

        I made a separate announcement with the link for mobile users since the icon might not work in mobile, will pin that for a day. I also plan on making these monthly statements at least once a month sometime around the beginning of the month.

    • Marina
      2·
      1 year ago

      Probably getting ahead of things a little, but it might be cool to set up a Bookwyrm community for literature.cafe one day! I started using it recently and I’m quite enjoying it.

      Thanks for setting things up, I’ll happily chip in for server costs whenever I can.

      • gabe [he/him]OPMA
        2·
        1 year ago

        I think a bookwyrm community would be fitting! I’m pretty sure they have a migration feature too. I can actually try and experiment and see how intensive it is on our resources and see if I can run it on this server…