Shadow comments on Welcome new users to piefed.ca and lemmy.ca!

Welcome new users to piefed.ca and lemmy.ca! (lemmy.ca)

submitted 9 months ago by otter@lemmy.ca to c/main@lemmy.ca

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It seems that a lot of new people have learned about these platforms from a popular post on Reddit. We currently see ~~78 notifications (and counting) and a pile of applications on piefed.ca~~ too many registration applications for me to keep this up to date.

I am pinning this thread on both platforms for new users to pop in to and ask questions. Please give them a warm welcome!

Please let us know how we can help! For example, here are some tips on finding communities: https://fedecan.ca/en/guide/lemmy/for-users/how-to-find-communities The guide says Lemmy, but the steps are the same on Piefed

Since a lot of people arrived here from r/BuyCanadian, maybe you will be interested in !buycanadian@lemmy.ca

🍁 Finding Canadian Communities on Piefed

Open a topic from this list: https://piefed.ca/topics
Browse that entire topic, or subscribe to individual communities from the sidebar

edit: 392 new users on the first day and hundreds more since then, all from one post 🥳

[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 child)

I left reddit during the first big API debacle exodus and joined lemmy.ca, around that time Smorks was tired of running the site all himself so I offered my help. Otter and MP3 joined shortly after to help administer everything.

As we took things over I wasn't comfortable taking donations without a proper non-profit in place, hence Fedecan was born. Big thanks to otter for putting in most of the work around it. We used to be hosted on OVH but after a big outage I donated some beefy server grade hardware to run us on, and we're in a datacenter in Vancouver now.

Monthly bills (hosting, domain reg, non-profit related stuff) are fully paid for by donations. We have no other funding and no affiliations to any other groups. We don't take any payment for running this, all our time is volunteered.

https://lemmy.ca/post/47466646 is a bit old now but has some more data about our donations / sites / infrastructure. There's several links at the top to more details as well. We're due for another big status update post but it might take me a bit to get to.

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[+] stinkytofuisgood@lemmy.ca 4 points 9 months ago (1 child)

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[–] Shadow@lemmy.ca 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

If Fedecan funding ever ceases to pay the bills, is there a plan in place, or does it shut down?

Realistically it would probably just shut down, but our donations are more than covering our expenses at the moment and the site is still growing. I don't have any concerns about not being able to pay the bills. The site only costs us about $200/mo to run so it's not a huge amount, but I'll admit it's only that low due to my donating a server worth around $40k (when it was new, although it'd be like $80k today thanks to ram prices).

May I suggest looking at government grants and funding if they don’t interfere with your goal and operations, especially now, the government is looking to boost Canadian enterprise.

Honestly, that sounds like a lot of work 😂 I'm not keen on spending time writing up business growth docs and having meetings, my day job has enough of that for me. If someone else comes along and wants to join the org + help drive that then we'd probably be open to it, but we've all got busy lives and it's not a priority for us.

do those working with Fedecan pay themselves for their work?

Nope. It's something we've discussed, but for now we're all on board with keeping things lightweight and not trying to turn this into wikipedia with regular fund raisers to pay salaries.