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.
I think our chances are good! In terms of running costs, currently they are dirt cheap and I'm keeping an eye on server load so I can scale up when needed. I expect if we ever get a huge influx of users I will need to start begging but we're a long way from that now.
Welcome!
I wanted to make sure we had a post up to welcome anyone who joins. So, welcome! I'll be trying to approve any applications as quickly as I can and hopefully finish setting things up and adding some communities quite soon.
If you do join, feel free to introduce yourself or make any suggestions as to what you'd like to see in terms of communities etc.
If you're new to Lemmy: creating an account on this instance doesn't limit you to only the communities here, it just sets this as your 'home' instance - you can still interact normally with users and communities from all the other federated instances.
You can browse, subscribe to, and participate in communities from other instances via the 'all' tab here:
https://lemmy.org.uk/home/data_type/Post/listing_type/All/sort/Active/page/1
If there is a community on another instance that you would like to view or subscribe to and you can't find it here, you can make it accessible to you and everyone else on this instance by going to the search page here and searching the full URL of the community you are interested in:
https://lemmy.org.uk/search
For example, if you would like to subscribe to the Humanities community from beehaw.org and you can't find it here, simply paste the full URL https://beehaw.org/c/humanities into the search form above and click 'search' (make sure you have 'all' selected). That should connect us to that community and it will be available to you and others from then on.
This instance currently has user creation of communities disabled. This is in the hope that it will lead us to create a more well-thought-out, unique, active set of local communities - all of which have a good moderation team. If you are interested in creating and modding a community here, head over to Community Proposals and create a post there outlining your idea.
Also just a note that I haven't got SMTP (email sending) configured on this server yet, so currently you won't receive an email when I approve your application, but I will be setting this up in the next couple of days. Until then, if you do apply then please just try signing in some time later.