Thanks, I really appreciate the sentiment!

Right now I’m not accepting any donations for these reasons:

1. It’s still early days for Lemmy in general. While I fully intend to continue running this instance, there are some questions about the scalability and future of Lemmy itself. If for some reason this instance did end up going down permanently, the last thing I would want is to be left with money from people who had kindly donated for server costs that was no longer needed.

2. Right now the costs are minuscule, and I think I could comfortably double or possibly quadruple the server power/size without breaking the bank, so I would prefer to pay for the costs myself as long as they are this affordable and just consider it an expense for a hobby, which it is!

3. If/when I do accept donations I would like to make this as transparent as possible so it was clear exactly how much was being donated and where the money was going, and I’m not sure of the best way to do this yet.

That all said, if Lemmy really takes off and this does end up becoming a large instance incurring significant costs then I probably will need to accept donations (similar to the other larger instances like Beehaw are doing now), but I think we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

Hi Thomas, we’re running on a DigitalOcean droplet at their LON1 datacentre.

Thanks for being here!

I think our chances are good! In terms of running costs, currently they are dirt cheap and I’m keeping an eye on server load so I can scale up when needed. I expect if we ever get a huge influx of users I will need to start begging but we’re a long way from that now.

Thanks for joining!

I’m hoping once we have a few members we may be able to persuade the mods of some of the UK-specific subreddits to set up Lemmy communities here (especially with the Reddit API changes approaching), as personally my experience is in software and not community moderation!