I just saw an email from Buy Me a Coffee. Not just one. I went in, and I’m truly shocked. Thank you all for the support; I would like to thank each and every one of you individually someday. Honestly, I don’t know what to say. The account balance is $350, which will definitely allow me to develop kbin faster or at least not worry so much about equipment costs. Today, I don’t have the headspace to think about how exactly I’ll use it, but I will definitely consult with you and report back in the future. Thank you also for all the kind words, suggestions, and questions. They are equally important to me.
I’m sorry that the current circumstances are such that kbin isn’t functioninng as it should, but it has given me additional motivation to keep fighting. That’s for sure.
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.
I’d like to second this
Third this
Motion passed.
It’s also useful because it allows monthly flow, which is way more useful for planning than just a lump sum and ??? on what you’ll get in a few months.
Also it helps to further gauge growth. New users is one thing, but new users actively donating for the betterment of the project is something entirely different. (Also first kbin.social comment, hope this place explodes in a good way!)
Agreed, brah. I just donated, and would gladly donate via recurring methods if implemented. Also, what Kaldo said earlier…don’t develop this by yourself, you’re gonna burn out faster than you think.
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!
Please support debit cards…
I cannot get the PayPal link to work…
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!
Solid advice! I’d also like to chime in and recommend that apart from keeping the official server alive so that new users can come in, please prioritize on making it easier for other developers to start contributing to the codebase and setting up new instances.
I love the way people are supporting you and the way this project has been shaping up. Best wishes!
Second this. I’d suspect the influx of Reddit expatriates contains a disproportionate rate of software engineers compared to the general population, many of whom would be happy to help support this project in their free time. Source: it’s me, I am one.
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.
Great shout out to Open Collective. Better to support open source community efforts than yet another corpo-profit-machine
I definitely prefer this to patreon. I would absolutely set a monthly recurring donation for this project!
More likable than Spez already lol
That’s a very low bar lol
Keep up the great work, just getting into kbin and enjoying it!
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.
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)
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?
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.
Can someone post a link to the buymeacoffee page so I can donate?
If you sort comments by hot it’s the first comment –> https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin
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.
Lemmy also has an issue of being developed and flagship instances ran by unironic Tankies. People are a lot slower to clue in on Tankies than Neo-Nazis because for some reason denying genocides as a hoax and Western propaganda works for Tankies in a way that denial of the Holocaust as a hoax and Jewish propaganda doesn’t work for Nazis. It’s funny because if the devs were Nazis nobody would touch Lemmy with a 20 foot pole. People are a lot more ignorant of Tankies and there is a big excuse of “So what? Just make your own Lemmy instance if it bothers you isn’t that the point of Federation?” that wouldn’t exist if the devs were Neo-Nazis rather than Tankies.
As long as they can closely control the narrative and keep the
.ml(Marxist-Leninist) instances as the larger/flagship communities they’ll hold sway over their part of their part of the Fediverse and can surround themselves with people who are as radical as they are or open to being radicalized. Those who control the trunk control the branches.I don’t know anything about ernest and I consider that a good thing because that means they don’t already have a bad reputation as a political extremist. Which made Kbin the easy choice to make between the two federation alternatives to Reddit.
I can understand your reasoning, but would your stance be different if you didn’t know the political spectrum/ideology of the devs when joining lemmy or something else?
Just because you don’t see something doesn’t mean that it isn’t there.
Have you vetted every single mod, admin, developer of every online community you joined to see if they are up to your political standards?
We are now on Kbin and can communicate with lemmy instances. Does that make one supportive of the ideology of the developers of lemmy?
You make a good point but at the end of the day, the best you can do is choose the lesser evil, not let perfect be the enemy of good. We don’t know if Ernest has skeletons in his closet but we do know that lemmy does and they aren’t ashamed of them.
@Kaldo The point is, I don’t want to create a lesser evil here. I want to create something truly good, which is why from the very beginning I’ve been striving to be transparent on all fronts. I’ll just say that before starting from scratch, I tried to create kbin as a fork of Lemmy. I like Rust, I respect them as architects and I’ve learned a lot about managing such a project. However, ultimately, I believe that I cannot remain indifferent to certain things. That’s why kbin is what it is now. Nevertheless, that collaboration with Lemmy’s developers can be beneficial for all of us at this stage. After all, Lemmy is not just one instance, and many amazing people are building the fediverse using this software.
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.
I created account today. However, I see that I have integrated my account with Stripe, and I can already see that funds are being transferred directly there.
