/kbin meta

Honestly dude start a Patreon or something even if you only do it for temporary. I would chip in $5/month for a while to pay for server costs if it means getting a stable site and a viable alternative to Reddit.

In case anyone is wondering, this is the link.

This is super nice, but I think (and hope) you're going to need a lot more than $350 very soon!

I'm glad the project is getting traction, it really seems like a promising piece of tech and I'd love for more people to start using it! Fediverse-based communities really seem like the future that we should work towards.

If there's one piece of advice I could give as a fellow software dev... try not to take it all on yourself and burn out. Get the project as ready for contributors as possible, update readmes and docs and mark easy issues that other people can potentially solve. Otherwise it's gonna start to feel like exponential amount of work and pressure over time.

Anyway, gj and gl!

I have seen https://opencollective.com/ used a lot to collect donations in a transparent way (also supporting crypto payments). Maybe that is something you want to look into as well.

I am stunned how well the place is holding up, well done. The odd little issue is to be expected. The next few weeks could be crazy, so look after yourself.

Yeah, funding for site hosting and development is probably essential.

Listen, back in the old days (fuck me to death with chopsticks I feel old), the internet was run by users.

Users posted the sites, users ran the sites (basically proto mods, lol), and users hosted the sites. THEY ALSO DEVELOPED THE SITES, usually in fucking notepad (yeah bitches, I'm talking back in 1999 here.

One thing that the internet was back then was community driven. This corporate walled garden bullshit didn't exist at all at the time, and the internet of today is unrecognizable. Back then, everyone basically had their own website. Almost anyway, but if you were into a game, the two forums for that game, were hosted privately by some dudes who loved the game, with a website that had info on the game hosted by some other dude who lost his family to the game (tbf, he was probably pretending to be another dude, Tropic Thunder rocks).

Eventually, all of this stuff became Reddit and Wikipedia, etc. It got centralized and had to cater to financial pressure from ad agencies, etc (hence, the bullshit you see today).

The users of the internet back then were happy enough to throw in to hosting costs if they were needed (they usually were).

I'm happy to help here, many users (according to this thread) are likewise happy to throw in, it'll work just fine like it always did.

Funding is easy if people are willing, this thread says that they are. We just need to set something up and funding for hosting costs, etc can just vanish for you.

You know that you can just place a Paypal QR code here and people can send money to it, right? That could work. Paypal takes tiny % of transaction fees compared to most of the more standard payment collection platforms like gofundme, etc.

Make a monthly server cost target (with good bandwidth, nobody wants shit bandwidth and lag) with a QR code to send money via Paypal or whatever is best (I'm hardly a comprehensive expert on the subject of payment platforms). Be open and transparent about it (post your Paypal transactions/balance, etc), and any hosting costs should vanish and not be a problem. People are clearly happy to pay them.

If you're not developing this thing full time, just talk to the community and maybe we can work something out.

I'm seeing a lot of willing here for what this platform is offering.

More likable than Spez already lol

I just checked some reviews on buymeacoffee.com and a lot of people complained that the site was unreliable when it came to paying out, have you been able to withdraw actual money into your actual bank account from it yet? As soon as that's confirmed I'd be pleased to chip in.

Keep up the great work, just getting into kbin and enjoying it!

your efforts are thanks enough for me. Happy to help support you and this project.

@ernest You should do a big announcement for your donation thing. Do you have like a official Kbin fediverse profile for people to follow?

Can someone post a link to the buymeacoffee page so I can donate?

🤘😄

I'd definitely say it's probably a good thing to look into how to get monthly ongoing revenue to help with server costs / development.

I get that right now with the massive influx of people coming across, the attention might be on rapidly pushing out improvements and getting things stable, but at some point getting some sort of funding would help ensure the future stability of the site as it continues to expand (and it should rapidly if people actually flee Reddit on June 30th)

I'm ready let's delete reddit 👌

$350 is a lot? This site must be pretty lean if it can handle this influx of users for cheap. I'd love to know more about how it's set up and hosted.

Make that $10 more.

I came into kbin with kinda low expectations. I fear that Reddit is too big to fail, and that if a competitor isn't already where Reddit was when Digg died it won't achieve the critical mass needed to get anywhere. My impression of Lemmy was that it's just not ready yet.

But the more I explore kbin, the more impressed I am with the software. It's still a long way to go to attract the userbase, and I still don't know if that critical mass will come, but I want to try and push for this. Let's see what happens, nothing to lose and everything to gain.