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.
Thanks for the transparency and for hosting us. But let us know how we can chip in when the time comes. You shouldn’t pay for all of us out of your own pocket.
I also want to add my voice to this demonstration of gratitude. As CaptObviousb just said, your transparency is highly commendable. Thanks for letting us inhabit your server.
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
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.
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…
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.
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.
What’s the storage usage right now that costs $2.20?
Object storage, AKA pictures. It has ballooned to $5.90, a significant portion being a fee related to the fact I deleted so much images today (I know. It made me feel like shit knowing I basically paid extra to purge cached CSAM)
Thankfully lemmy is implementing disabling remote image caching so that cost should stabilize really quickly.
What’s that in gigs though? Also it doesn’t personally bother me lol, I don’t like the idea of permeance on the web.
what the fuck LMAO
Oh that pricing seems actually pretty good?
The storage size is wild though
Yeah that’s pretty crazy lol, especially since your instance isn’t huge yet. I know what lemm.ee did was cap their upload size to 100kb or something, so it’s just large enough to handle things like profile pictures, but not big enough to actually host images. The point is to encourage their users to upload to other services like imgur so they don’t have to deal with it.
I’ll double check tomorrow where we stand with on the gigs. Im currently in bed, but last I checked it was quite a lot but I have no clue
