Hey everyone! Figured I would do an AMA to kick off some activity in the IAmA community over here. Feel free to throw down some questions below and ill answer them
I'm currently a student in university and have been doing both web development and game development recently (web for internships, game on my own). Out of the four admins ive been the one mainly handling community creation and managing in the instance to make sure everythings running smoothly
Some other misc topics that I can answer about: I compose music & make pixel art, and my favorite games are minecraft, SCP:SL, everhood, battlerite, and metal slug 3
If anyone else wants to do an AMA feel free to start one up in the community (assuming it fits the instance). Any activity helps get the ball rolling for getting it active
how are you guys affording the server costs for your instance?
and how do you intend to pay them in the future when more people are subscribed to your instance?
Were running off of donations with money donated to snowe on github here https://github.com/sponsors/snowe2010/ being put towards server costs
We hopefully shouldnt have to do anything else in terms of getting money (theres some fixes being pushed out for lemmy that will significantly reduce the load on the server which will really help). Worst case maybe we can do some visual stuff for donators but I dont want to run ads
I don't know where you're hosting, (you mentioned in another post other admins handle that) -
But you could try hosting in AWS. You can attempt to apply for credits, and could receive anywhere from $5000 to $100.000 in free credits for the first year or 2. That would save you from having any hosting costs
For simpler hosting AWS can end up being much more expensive (and more work to manage) so it can be more cost-effective to stick to a VPS from providers like DigitalOcean, Hetzner, etc.
For example, lemmy.world is hosted on Hetzner and uses an alternative to S3 for media, if I had to wager they'd probably spend much more by being on AWS.
Well yea, that's why I mentioned to see if they can apply for a sponsorship. They do it pretty easily. If AWS foots the bill for the first 2 years, they could still just migrate out of it after the free period has ended