- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
- support@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- support@beehaw.org
- support@beehaw.org
obligatory preface: we’re 100%-user funded and everything you donate to us specifically goes to the website, or any outside labor we pay to do something for us.
overall expenses this month: $523.79
as expected, a full month of running on last month’s setup has come in pretty high. luckily, we expect downsizing to begin this month (and we have a pretty good idea of what we’re going to do) so this will be our last month of costs at this scale. our initial estimation is that we can halve or better what we’re paying now on a monthly basis.
$428.73 for Digital Ocean hosting, which can be further subdivided into
- $336.00 for hosting the site itself
- $67.20 for backups
- $25.53 for site snapshots
$28.87 for Hive, an internal chat platform we’ve set up (also being hosted on Digital Ocean)
- $24.07 for hosting Hive
- $4.80 for backups
~$39.16 for email functionality, which can be further subdivided into
- $35/mo for Mailgun (handles outbound emails, so approval/denial/notifications emails; also lets us not get marked as spam)
- ~$4.16/mo ($50/yr, already paid in full) for Fastmail (handles all inbound emails)
$22.87 for BackBlaze (redundant backup system that’s standalone from Digital Ocean)
overall contributions this month: $1,310.90
support still more than covers our expenses, and particularly with our upcoming downsizing we don’t believe this will be a problem. breakdown is:
- 100 monthly contributions, totaling $624.95
- 2 yearly contributions, totaling $67.10
- 36 one-time donations, totaling $618.85
between monthly and yearly contributions we are still sustainable overall—but now that the Reddit bump has ebbed most of our savings will come in the form of lowering costs and not “sheer amount of money being thrown our way.”
total end of month balance: $4,347.79
expense runway, assuming no further donations
- assuming expenses like ours this month: we have about 8 months and one week of runway
Hey just a thought, but have you considered also measuring your labor in terms of hours worked by admin staff etc? I’m assuming it’s unpaid.
I think showing the financials is great but to me it shows only one part of the picture, if that makes sense. Your work has value!
I really appreciate all the work that goes into this place, and really, thanks for all you do.
I would wager I’ve spent between 40-70hours a week working on Beehaw directly or on things relating to it with as high as 90hours a week at the peak - I would wake up, open Beehaw, eat, sleep. None of us get paid for this, it would likely bankrupt Beehaw in less than a week if we were paid even minimum wage. The only reason I can do this is because I don’t have a job - which is putting me in a bad financial situation honestly… I really should’ve gotten a job but I didn’t.
Thank you for the appreciation.
Surely that isn’t sustainable for you or beehaw? On the one hand, please take care to look after your own best interests. We really appreciate your work, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of your well-being.
On the other hand, if the project is based on full time volunteer work by people who can’t afford to volunteer full time over the long term, surely that is a major risk to the long term viability of the instance?
It worked for reddit for 18 years. They just need more volunteers.
40-90 hours a week isn’t sustainable, but adding a few more people takes it out of burnout territory.
Reddit has always had paid employees, only the mods are/were unpaid.
I completely agree. It makes it more sustainable on both sides
That’s certainly true but the issue is that we don’t really have other options. Lemmy’s system allows for little delegation outside of giving full admin powers. There’s an issue to improve that but as with all of Lemmy’s moderation woes - it seems no one is working on it.
On the other hand, if the project is based on full time volunteer work by people who can’t afford to volunteer full time over the long term, surely that is a major risk to the long term viability of the instance?
this is quite belated but now i’m back to a computer so i can answer this at some length: this is a fundamental issue of the fediverse which nobody has solved. the money is just not there for this to be any sort of compensated job, even at the level of “monthly stipend between the admins” (because that’d double the expenses you see here at minimum). maybe if this site was pay-to-join perhaps we could make a scheme like that work but that has its own drawbacks too–and at least in our case could select for an audience which would exclude many of the very people we want to make a space for.
there is a brute force answer which may or may not work in the long run, which is “have a lot of people keeping an eye on the website”. that of course introduces its own vectors for issues but is basically the way we’re making this work right now, and will probably be the case into the foreseeable future unless people get much more generous with their spending here.
Thanks for the detailed response. It doesn’t seem like there is a perfect answer here, but it is very important that you and other admins/mods can find some sort of sustainable way to delegate and manage for the long term. We really appreciate what you have done so far
I really do appreciate the work you put into Beehaw, but to echo what others have said, I don’t think anyone wants this to be unsustainable for you, or anyone else working on Beehaw.
At the least I think it could be reported as part of donations/expenses? Rough numbers would be fine too (because the overhead of tracking hours is not fun). So I’m imagining something like:
400 hours unpaid work (2 full time people working, 1 part-time) (if paid, that’s $6,000 at minimum wage, $8,800 at a livable wage)
Which is a lot of money, and very scary, but at least it makes the behind-the-scenes work visible.
That said, I’m going to go set up a monthly donation now 🤗
I want to add my support for the unpaid labor being reported as part of the financial report. It would add more clear transparency to the total effort involved.
The human toll is hard to quantify but should not be ignored.
It’s worth mentioning that a lot of moderation work is kinda always in the back of your mind and work even when it’s not directly - answering people’s questions, chatting in our mod chat, talking to other admins, etc.
No illusions on my part. This is true for a lot of jobs that have 24/7 support activity and also jobs that have an emotional toll that lingers when not “working” (social workers, teachers in bad neighborhoods, nurses, content moderators). And as such, the pay scale is commensurate. It’s not that it solves the problem, but that it can afford the individuals time off and rehabilitation services.
I feel that putting dollar amounts on the work would be confusing to people, they might think we’ll take that money. I’ve thought about making a post to donate money to me personally because well, I need the money but I don’t know.
At the least I think it could be reported as part of donations/expenses? Rough numbers would be fine too (because the overhead of tracking hours is not fun). So I’m imagining something like:
400 hours unpaid work (2 full time people working, 1 part-time) (if paid, that’s $6,000 at minimum wage, $8,800 at a livable wage)
i can attempt this for the next expense report but it seems a bit academic. just estimating here, the number per month is already something like twice the total amount of money we’ve received over the course of the site’s existence, and several times what we received this month.
I would rather see ads or something than having someone work that hard for no pay to keep it going. Have you thought about other potential revenue streams, or would you like to workshop or discuss options?
One idea that I believe could use some discussion is Beehaw merchandise.
I would be delighted to wear a Beehaw shirt out and about, and I’d love a Beehaw sticker for my laptop. I am happy to contribute labor to making these things happen - please let me know if I can assist in any way. My design skills are mediocre, but I am capable of taking an existing thing and turning it into a format that works for various applications, and I’m familiar with setting up basic online storefronts for print-on-demand etc.
An official Beehaw merchandise online store would be something that would require talks with all the admins with voting power. That would be my self, Gaywallet, Lionir and Alyaza. You could begin by creating a post about this in c/chat and pinging all of us there.
I would also happily donate some design labour towards Beehaw merchandise.
☹️
Do you haz a sad?
If this level of transparency was available for various news and other social sites, I’d be more likely to buy a subscription to them.
The honesty is great and makes this feel more like an actual community or a co-op.
I’ll be curious to see how these numbers change, both the monthly cost and the amount of contributions, as more and more people join up.
Agree with everything in this comment, especially
makes this feel more like an actual community or a co-op.
🥰 TOTALLY, and it makes me feel very good about my recurring donation - the people running the server care, I care, pretty much everybody interacting here really, truly cares about the community, I genuinely love supporting that. This is a beautiful place on the internet.
I love the amount of transparency in this post!
Keep up the great work y’all 🫶
I wish there was a link to donate at the end of this post.
Yeah this is absolutely the right place for it, at the bottom of a post that will attract almost exclusively people who care about the financials
Yeah… it’s at the top as the link for the post
Well, maybe it needs to be in 2 places for dummies like me. Lol. I kicked in a few bucks. Thanks. For what you do, friend.
Here, have some money
What is your intent with a comment like this? Anything constructive we can address for you?
What is your intent with a comment like this?
they were being quite literal [i got their donation email :)]
Alright, apologies @Quill7513@slrpnk.net , I was assuming the worst with a sarcastic comment.
Nope. This post was just the reminder I needed that I’m financially stable again after a hard month and that I’d pledged myself to put some money in the pot going forward to ensure the future of Beehaw. The comment coming from my slrpnk.net account is quite simple. I was on mobile and didn’t realize which account I was logged into
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with encouraging other people to donate, even if they are peacocking a little bit.
Thank you for the transparency! It is important to remember that it’s not just the amazing work the mods do here but there is a real cost to running this.
Thanks for posting, it’s really interesting to see what goes into running something like this.
Chucked a bit into the pot. It’s not a lot but I want to contribute where I can.
Y’all are doing yeopeople’s work! The transparency is much appreciated.
I love these breakdowns of the financing! Thanks for all your work and communication, it really makes me feel like a stakeholder in the community instead of a string in a database.
I love to see the transparency. Thank you for facilitating such a great online experience.
As always, thank you for your transparency! <3
Hey there - I work in film production and have a fair bit of HDD space just laying around. How much do you need to be useful for backups? Happy to contribute some hardware to the cause if it’s at all remotely useful and host a local backup as one more offsite redundancy for you. That being said, I don’t really know what your data storage demands are.
Current requirements are about 50GB a day, and keeping 7 days prior, and one a week (about 300GB a month) for backups alone, not keeping more than a month. Also using backblaze B2 as a standard for that storage now.
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Apologies, I may have not been entirely clear with my wording:
currently keeping 7 days of daily backups ~ 50 GB a day Keeping 1 backup of a week per 4 weeks ~ 50 GB each Keeping 1 full backup of the week a month ~ 50 GB each
Gives us a current storage requirement of (7 * 50) + (50 * 4) + ( 50) = ~ 600GB for a month of backups.
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A thought I’ve had for a little bit now is what is making sure Beehaw isn’t sold off? I have no doubt in the current intentions of the admins, but as Beehaw grows it can become very valuable for data companies. If this wonderful community thrives, there will be eventually be people and companies making offers to buy everything we’ve built. Is there any plan to ensure Beehaw doesn’t sell out? I’ve been burned before, and I want to ensure that if I’m going to contribute financially that I won’t lose Beehaw.
I mean, that’s a question of trust. There’s nothing I can do other than promise that I or any of the admins would never sell off Beehaw.
That said, if it reassures you, our disregard for “growth for the sake of growth” should push away any kind of company seeking money. It’d be much more lucrative to go for a big instance like lemmy.world.
How could we do more than ask for trust?
Speaking of that instance… has there been any progress on federating with them again?
I was surprised to see little talk about Donald’s Jan6th charges on my feed, but after flipping accounts I realised most of the chatter was going on over there.
I don’t particularly mind if I need a dedicated LW account… but it would be nice to be able to keep my posts consolidated under this one.
I actually have a different account for each of several popular instances (including some kbin and even Mastodon instances), in large part because I want to see how the different communities grow organically in environments where different admins/mods might have different approaches to federation with other instances, modding, enabling/disabling downvotes, requirements for creating a new account, communities, rules/norms, etc.
So far I spend most of my time on Beehaw with my Beehaw account, but I am still somewhat active on a few others. If this place ends up growing to the point where it needs to implement more formal administrative overhead of things like a constitution/charter and bylaws defining how admins, mods, and users are to interact and define the future of the instance, and the admins are able to pull that off, this will probably end up becoming my main home on the fediverse.
Unfortunately, the moderation and federation tools have received no attention at all. We’ve only noticed more and more problems…
I would really like to say yes but we’re kinda stuck in this situation, especially considering that .world is now 10x the size of Beehaw… We can’t take this moderation load while the tools are all broken and missing.
That’s a pity, but also very understandable.
Thank you for taking the time to reply ❤️
I realize we’re wildly off topic here, but how much is there really to discuss about the Aug. 1 indictments? You want 45 pages of factual details? Read the indictment.
It’s a criminal proceeding. I guess one is entitled to opinions, but the merits (or lack thereof) of a criminal case reside in the purview of attorneys. General IANAL discussion is pissing into the wind, so I’m not lamenting a lack of masturbatory discussion on Beehaw.
General IANAL discussion is pissing into the wind, so I’m not lamenting a lack of masturbatory discussion on Beehaw.
What the hell, that’s weirdly graphic?
Maybe an inside reference from my college newsroom doesn’t land the same way with a general audience. Every opinion editor started their term with a “masturbatory” plea for contributions as though no one would submit columns without such an entreaty.
I recommend turning Beehaw into a cooperative where to be a member one has to contribute monthly financially. I understand this is no easy task, and am only sharing my best idea. I really like this place.
I think in principle it sounds like a good idea. However, I’d caution against overlooking the administrative overheads that a formal governance structure would impose.
A cooperative would need oversight, accounting, legal and a ton of other instruments or functions to operate. Currently the hosting costs look like they’re about $500 a month, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that a formal organization that governs the day-to-day operation of beehaw can have overheads that easily go up to 10x or more over the hosting costs.
Right now, in my mind, beehaw is essentially a bunch of cool dudettes/dudes that are hosting a BBQ party in their backyard. They only have one rule, you are welcome as long as you’re nice to everyone. You can also choose to help chip-in for pizza and beer if you like, that will be very welcome. Otherwise, the cost of hosting this party comes out of their own pockets.
Now we have some generous folks who are happy to chip in a fiver or tenner here and there to keep the party going, that’s great. However, some attendees are now starting to get a little uncomfortable since the party is growing and the F&B pot is healthy. What if the hosts were to spoil the party by selling the rights to it? What if they start monetizing the party through other nefarious means, or begin to compromise on their “be nice” principle and let everyone in?
Perhaps we will need to elect a bunch of hall monitors to make sure this doesn’t happen. And let’s get in an accountant or two to make sure the F&B money is actually used to buy pizza and beer. In fact, let’s get a couple of lawyers to come in and make sure everything’s above board. Oh wait, since legality is now a concern, we better look into insuring ourselves against litigation risks. In the process of doing all these, let’s also have a group of elders to meet once a year and certify that the party is indeed running against what the hosts promised it would be.
But it all started only because a small bunch of cool people decided to have a free party in their backyard, and all they wanted was for people to be nice to one another.
The thing is, there’s a thousand other backyard parties out there and anyone unhappy with the way this party is organized is very, very, very free to go to other parties. In fact, they are actively encouraged to. That’s the whole point of these parties in the first place, go to one that you’d enjoy and have fun in.
Not sure if I’m rambling or making any sense. But to be honest, I wouldn’t blame the admins if this gradual enshittification is not what they signed up for.
It’s certainly an area that has been thrown around and I can certainly see the benefits. I, personally speaking, worry though that democratic models at such an early stage can be abused. I also worry about money being a barrier for entry as that could keep out good people that simply don’t have the means - I don’t know that I could spend a membership fee as a student with no job because of all this volunteering work…
I think a solution where the community gets some kind of codified constitution is a good one, but it requires both a knowledge of organizational law and a understanding of what makes the community great. If things get nailed down too soon, or get something wrong, it could really mess BeeHaw up. Maybe it’s a good long term goal.
I do wish people would not use start-up terminology like ‘runway’ - it’s a aviation metaphor, and implies an eventual ‘take off’ which is usually the point at which a start-up goes public or is sold by the capital investment firm to take their sky-high profits.
Our ‘Northern Star’ (or guiding principle) has been, for over two years, ‘be(e) nice’. This is the ONLY objective that we have.
That doesn’t answer the question…
I think they tried. It’s just a hard question to answer. How would you guarantee someone something like that?
There’s legal framework for making that more sure, but that’s a lot to ask I agree there’s no good answer to that question. You never know, a lot of people get blinded by money even if you’d never expect it from them. Just the way the world works you don’t know yourself even until the temptation is presented.
Clearly that’s not the goal and I do trust that they are more committed to their vision and morals than that, but it’s not something you can ever rule out entirely.
The issue when we bring in legality is the need for formal processes, oversight, validation, audit, blah blah blah and those come with (very) expensive administrative overheads. You quickly realize you need to have bookkeepers, legal counsel on retainer, a formal Board, charters, general meetings, all of which are likely to cost far (many times) more than just hosting costs.
I am not a lawyer, but I can quickly see overheads like these spiraling way out of control. Happy to be corrected by someone more knowledgeable than I am.
How would you guarantee someone something like that?
Incorporate, NFPO, most likely 501©(7).
Besides that, I don’t think they tried. “Do no evil” isn’t reassuring in the slightest, especially to those of us who remember Reddit before Advance and Tencent bought in. This is when Reddit was literally user powered (image relevant). We bought gold for other redditors, knowing that the funds were directly supporting the site. Go take a look at how that worked out. “It’s your site”, “we couldn’t do this without you”, meaningless. I remember when they pledged 10% of annual ad revenue to non-profits, selected by the users. They really did the most to make the users feel like they were part of something special. We see how that turned out.
Obviously, support whoever and whatever you like. All I want to do is balance out the optimism. Real money is changing hands here, and some of us have been down this road a couple of times. Those experiences have taught me that it’s at least as likely that the site-runners want to be rich and successful as it is that they can resist the temptation when it comes knocking, and that’s being generous.
I see what you mean, but I also believe that the value of places like Beehaw often lies in the intermediary stage before they become an institution or wither away and die.
Right now Beehaw is pretty close to the peak of what it can be. It’s the equivalent of a large online block party. If it gets bigger than this it will need to institionalize or wither away. What you’re asking is for it to institionalize sooner than is necessary, which is what will kill the feeling.
Beehaw has a lifespan to it, we should all recognize this now. Beehaw is great because it runs on good faith and trust. These are limited resources and they’ll run out eventually, either sell out or burn out.
The best way to approach it is to put into it what you get out of it, and stop putting into it when you stop getting value out of it.
It feels as though you’re confusing the corporate model of websites with Beehaw.
Nothing lasts forever, but the motivations behind enshittification are key to enshittification, with the key one explicitly rejected by Beehaw being growth for its own sake.
There’s no need for Beehaw to get bigger, and thanks to the volunteer efforts of the admins and mods, it’s currently sustainable through donations. Pivoting to profit isn’t inherent to buying a domain and providing a service.
I think it’s a very good one. It conveys what kind of atmosphere you’re trying to achieve, but remains flexible enough that it allows unique responses to unique situations. You don’t get bogged down by people who think they’re cleverly almost breaking the rules, but not quite.
To this question, I think a potential solution would be if this community were to transition into a collaborative organization (i.e. co-op, socialist collective, etc.). Such that the ownership is not concentrated in a small private group and the potential acquisition/buyout/selling-of-data requires a decision process that incorporates the concent/buy-in from the entire community/collective.
In no way am I suggesting this needs to happen, but I would support such a movement.
It would be nice if I could donate via Apple Pay. Any plans for supporting that? Open Collective doesn’t appear to support it.
apple pay takes too much of your money for being a middleman
Open Collective accepts PayPal. AFAIK PayPal takes a larger cut of the transaction than Apple Pay does.
I know that Beehaw != Open Collective, so I’m not asking for any changes there. Just curious if there are any other plans to accept donations through other methods.
Money is money. X% of something is always better than 100% of nothing.
I’m fine dealing with PayPal, but when I just tried to set up a monthly donation I had to identify twice and got stuck on a PayPal login site.
Now maybe that’s because I was in a webview inside a PWA (Voyager), but at the moment I have no clue if it worked or not.
In general I prefer not to do things like this in ephemeral webviews, but didn’t realize until I was halfway through and at that point I didn’t want to restart the process.
IMO too many clicks to contribute and I’m sure some people will be turned away by not being able to just click and give.
A lot of candidate donors might not want to commit to monthly donations and honestly it should just be a page with a few preset options/tiers and an “other amount” field. Followed by a button that says “pay with Apple Pay”, PayPal, Google wallet, or whatever else is trending.
Lowering the effort involved is important. You can ask for an email address for receipts afterwards if the payment service doesn’t have the option to provide one. Same with registration.
Isn’t Apple Pay a payment service provider?
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