Hey Beeple,
Two of our lovely admins, @alyaza@beehaw.org and @Lionir@beehaw.org are both young and not currently employed. If you've ever wanted to buy any of the admins a coffee, slice of pizza, or a beer, now's your chance. Any donation will be greatly appreciated.
Here's a little something about Lionir:
I'm a student and as I often do, I get carried away. I should've gotten a job this summer to support myself but I didn't. I'm someone who volunteers on a lot of things both in my personal life and with my work online - this summer a lot of my attention and energy was focused on Beehaw as some of you probably noticed. Unfortunately for me, that doesn't really help me pay my bills as a student.
Here's a little something about Alyaza:
i am currently in the process of arranging the money to move out of my current situation. without going into too much detail: it is... basically necessary for my long-term safety and health to do this. i have some opportunities lined up which will hopefully materialize and likely cover the bulk of my expenses, but literally anything helps. any money you send my way will thus be going toward eventually moving out, and/or fees related to this.
If you can afford to do so, donations to their respective ko-fi accounts would be greatly appreciated. If you can't afford to do so, please don't worry about it, your support is still appreciated.
Here's Lionir's ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/lionir
and here's Alyaza's: https://ko-fi.com/alyazabirze
Right now, Beehaw/Lemmy needs better moderation tools. That takes time/effort (possibly money) in order to build these.
EDIT:
So many people have experienced this on Reddit for example. What makes these platforms most successful, for ALL the users, is better moderation tools. Where Reddit failed in this regard, third party volunteers stepped in to create things like Toolbox. Lemmy platforms, such as Beehaw, need these tools available in the software itself.
I mean, that is possible but the issue is mostly that Lemmy does not allow some form of restricted admin that can take moderation actions but not do things like defederations, deleting communities, changing application questions that can be quite dangerous. This means that giving someone admin powers gives them essentially full control of the instance - this makes it a very high barrier of trust for us to give someone that kind of power, especially when that's not what we need help with.
That said, I think it would've been impossible to prepare for this kind of growth in work and we've tried delegate when possible. I'm not sure the amount of effort I've put in would've changed very much, it would've likely just been directed in other places.
it is a thing we have in a big list of feature requests, and we're trying to coordinate someone working on it sooner rather than later (among other things) but yeah it kinda sucks lol
I wish I was better at coding. I'd like to help. I might try to learn Rust this fall/winter, then maybe I can contribute.
That may help the load for Beehaw, but volunteer labor won't pay anyone's bills. Adding more admins/mods won't solve this particular problem.