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submitted 9 months ago by admin@beehaw.org to c/chat@beehaw.org

Currently, we have $6,500.91 in our hopper.

It just seems weird having all of those, mostly, unused funds sitting there doing nothing.

I just wanted to start the conversation about the possibility of paying-it-forward in some capacity. For example, a certain percentage of monthly contributions could go to a charity.

What are your thoughts?

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[-] fwygon@beehaw.org 15 points 9 months ago

Personally I think a little fiscal conservation would be wise at this point.

Costs can, and do eventually, rise. Hardware fails, and other things can happen as a surprise; and I'd rather that Beehaw not be insolvent when those things happen.

While I get the wish to do fun things to enhance the community; I think we need to be keeping an eye on things too. A few bad months where users are squeezed and unable to contribute could also severely impact Beehaw; particularly in and around monthly costs. At no point should Beehaw admins be paying out-of-pocket for things if Beehaw itself as an organization has the funds to properly pay things.

If we do genuinely have too much funding in excess; examining how we could expand Beehaw or make it better is another way you can responsibly re-invest the funds into making Beehaw better.

Additional servers/services might be neat; things like:

  • A Mastodon server, if one doesn't already exist
  • A Matrix homeserver, if one doesn't already exist
  • A lightweight Pixelfed / image hosting/posting Service, if one doesn't already exist
  • Various and miscellaneous game servers/services like Minecraft or other popular multiplayer game servers/sessions/instances.

Of course such things could also require additional staff on hand, so I understand that you might want to entice someone to help manage these extra things first.

[-] Lionir@beehaw.org 9 points 9 months ago

Beehaw has enough to run without any additional donations for the next two years at the current costs so the finances of that seems well enough.

That said, I don't feel comfortable spending money donated to Beehaw for things non-Beehaw related.

As for expanding in other services.. Well, we already have enough trouble with Lemmy, I would not want to add more moderation hurdles personally.

[-] fwygon@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

Mastodon, for example, would have far better moderation tools than lemmy. As for your concerns with "Adding more moderation hurdles", genuinely I feel recruiting more mods before and while you spin up a service is fine. That may mean you take time to pick them out and train them right. That's fine. But I don't think moderation challenges are insurmountable.

this post was submitted on 09 Jan 2024
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