Thanks, I really appreciate the sentiment!
Right now I'm not accepting any donations for these reasons:
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It's still early days for Lemmy in general. While I fully intend to continue running this instance, there are some questions about the scalability and future of Lemmy itself. If for some reason this instance did end up going down permanently, the last thing I would want is to be left with money from people who had kindly donated for server costs that was no longer needed.
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Right now the costs are minuscule, and I think I could comfortably double or possibly quadruple the server power/size without breaking the bank, so I would prefer to pay for the costs myself as long as they are this affordable and just consider it an expense for a hobby, which it is!
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If/when I do accept donations I would like to make this as transparent as possible so it was clear exactly how much was being donated and where the money was going, and I'm not sure of the best way to do this yet.
That all said, if Lemmy really takes off and this does end up becoming a large instance incurring significant costs then I probably will need to accept donations (similar to the other larger instances like Beehaw are doing now), but I think we can cross that bridge when we get to it.
Alrighty. I've been following some of the discussions about the scalability in the backend actually, given my day job as an AWS systems architect, dealing with instances, containers, databases all day on big deployments. Hopefully the problems can be sorted out! Seems SQL might be the biggest blocker right now, but as we all know, removing one blocker often reveals one or more others. It's going to be a wild old time.
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