Quick server update:
Upgraded to Lemmy 0.18.1 - lots of goodies including new themes in the user profile, better new/active/hot filtering, etc. See full changelog for more details.
Checked the server status:
- Currently using 18/40GB of storage. Lemmy itself is using about 11 GB with half going to images and half to the database. This isn’t what we’re uploading ourselves but due to federation.
- CPU and RAM usage seem to be comfortable.
- Checked into upgrade options on Hetzner - these will be reasonable. I can continue with the 3,90 euro/month package for the moment.
Transparency is an important part of the open source world and users put a lot of trust in their instance admins. Thanks for your support!
Good question! I’m willing to cover up to about 20 euro per month in costs which will get us quite a few resources. I will be keeping a close eye on resource management and efficiency. If we ever get that far, I also plan to cap the number of users. At the end of the day, I see this as a contribution to the Fediverse and supporting free and open source. It’s a neat hobby to support this server, not a full time job. So at the end of the day, I’d rather cap the costs than extend indefinitely.
With that said, you never know what will happen next. I plan to continue these types of posts (monthly-ish?) for the sake of transparency but also to keep evaluating if any changes need to be made.
Capping sounds like a reasonable plan to prevent costs and admin efforts becoming unsustainable. While you can bring in more admins to lighten the workload it still requires coordination and leadership which can become too intrusive in the everyday life.
I’m sure people would be willing to contribute to costs via ad-hoc contributions if it were financially necessary to maintain the hosting.
That’s definitely a possibility but I see it as a bit further down the road - highly unlikely in the next 6-12 months.