Exciting News: Lemmy.ca is now managed by our new registered not-for-profit organization 'Fedecan' (+ resuming donations & gathering feedback)
We recently crossed the first anniversary for many of us on Lemmy and the Fediverse, and we are thrilled to announce an important milestone: we have started a new registered not-for-profit organization! The organization is registered as ‘Federated Open Communications Canada’, and we will go by 'Fedecan' in our day-to-day operations.
Over the past few months, we have been working behind the scenes on the necessary paperwork, bylaws, and other administrative tasks to get the organization rolling. Thanks to the invaluable feedback from our previous check-in, we decided to take the leap and register federally, which will allow us to operate across Canada more easily. For more details, you can check out the FAQs on our new website.
Resuming Donations
With this important step completed, we are now ready to resume accepting donations. We have set up several donation options to accommodate different preferences on convenience and fees. Our first priority is to reimburse those who have been covering server and other costs, and to set up regular financial updates. We are open to adding more donation options, so please let us know if there is an option you prefer.
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Donation Page: (fedecan.ca/donate)
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Alternate Donation page without embedded elements: (fedecan.ca/donate-private)
Our current costs
- Server hosting - $150/month
- Domains registrations - $50/year
- Non profit requirements - $500 one time
Our Next Steps:
- Reimburse individuals who have covered server and operational costs and to set up more regular financial updates
- Collaboratively creating guides and learning resources about Lemmy and the Fediverse (ex. how things work, data/privacy details, and best practices for moderating or running instances, etc.) + translations
- Exploring other platforms to run. Some that are on our radar include Sublinks, Pixelfed, and Matrix
- Developing logos, colours, and other branding details based on ideas from the community
What we want to know:
- Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns? This will also help us expand our FAQs
- Which other platforms would you like us to explore?
- Do you prefer any other donation method?
We want to help build a better online experience for everyone, and that requires an organization with a strong foundation. This should be the first step in that process.
Thank you for everything so far, and we look forward to seeing you around! 🥳
The Fedecan Team
I wanna give /u/otter a big 🙌 for all the work he's done here. All the fedecan site and content was him, as well as dealing with the more mundane paperwork to sort this all out.
😊
It was totally a group effort! Thankfully, I had some extra time the past few months to dedicate to this, and I learned a lot throughout the process. Really excited to get started on the next portion of the project!
Very cool! Thank you for taking the initiative on this!
Holy moly, this is great for ensuring both the continuity of your instance and the infrastructure necessary for federated social media! Really good plans all around.
Congratulations !
Thank you! I'm hoping to shift some of my focus now towards getting those guide pages up, in particular the ones on moderation and community building. I heard we already have a PR so hopefully it's easy enough for everyone to weigh in / contribute :)
FOCC ya! If anyone can, Fedecan!
Happy to see you're accepting donations again!
Great news. I use this site far more than I used Netflix before I cancelled that service so I consider a monthly donation money well spent.
This is it right here.
Exciting stuff! Here’s to healthier social media!
FYI, the "Support Lemmy" link in the menu on lemmy.ca site is going to the general Lemmy donation page at join-lemmy.org
That's actually hard coded inside lemmy-ui: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/5cd66bb037aca82bef396d48dd9e4ec6f21ef747/src/shared/config.ts#L7-L8
Ah, good to know.
The website looks great!
Sponsored monthly! Way to go everyone, this is awesome. Contributing feels like something good I can do in the face of a whole lot of bad in the world rn, and I’m grateful this instance exists and is so well supported. 🫡 🙏
We're excited too :)
Did you have any particular service that you might us to focus on?
Not the person you replied to, but what about Mastodon?
We haven't made any final decisions yet, but right now I think a lot of us already use https://mstdn.ca alongside Lemmy.
It might be a duplicated effort to spin up another mastodon, whereas we could focus our attention on new platforms + support the existing Canadian mastodon instance in other ways
Also not the persons you replied to but I am very interested in ![email protected] (so much so, I started the community) which is a kind of Goodreads, IMDb, etc, etc replacement - basically all those sites that used to be great and have been bought out by big companies (mainly Amazon in the two named cases).
You mentioned the costs for server hosting, domain registration and non-profit requirements, which is great so we have an idea of how much needs to be covered with donations going forward.
You also mentioned reimbursing people for past costs. What's the current debt?
Thanks for doing all of this.
Since we took over in June 2023, truckbc has been paying personally for the server. All costs including the non profit registration (covered by me) have added up to about $2500 so far.
I don't have the number handy but going off memory, Smorks has about $1000 in donations from before he was going to transfer our way.
Ideally I'd just like to keep our finances totally public, but we're not that organized yet.
That's not something I know anything about, so I'll let you guys sort out what to do there (along with everything else) :)
But given what you've been open about so far:
~$1500 in debt ~$155/month ongoing costs (amortizing the domain reg over the year)
Thanks, I'll come up with a good donation amount based on these numbers :)
How was the process for registering a non-profit?
Tbh not too bad, just some dredging through paperwork and having to write up the bylaws, etc. Vancity was pretty helpful in getting the banking setup.
Wow, another reason to switch to Vancity.
This is great! I've been wanting to provide support. Now I'm signed up for monthly.
I wish I could donate now, but I broke my foot and I'm off work because of it so I don't have any income. Thank you for all your hard work to provide this service to Canadians and other people from around the world!
Don't feel bad, take care of yourself first!
Give only if you can. If enough of us who can give do give, we should be able cover the current costs and provide some buffer.
From each according to their ability, etc
No worries at all, hope you have a speedy recovery! The idea is that people can contribute what they can, when they can, and that should be enough to keep the service free and accessible to everyone :)
This is great, but I'd also like to have an idea of what is needed to support this on an individual level. I know that isn't easy since this is just starting up, but we should have an idea of what's needed individually once things have been running for a while. Suggested donations would make it easier to know what's appropriate to keep this afloat.
In the meantime, I'll do a one-time donation partially to help build a cash reserve (and to support the year of good service I've already received).
Thanks again for all your hard work, both in running the server and in getting thos NFP set up.
Agreed, but like you said it's hard to know right now. We only need around 30 people at $5/mo to cover costs, but will 30 people donate? 🤷
We'll post a funding update in a month or so once things settle in a bit.
If you're tight on cash, don't give it to us.
I mostly posted that to raise visibility. I understand it's a hard question to answer right now. $5/mo was kind of what I was thinking, but I don't even know how many accounts/users are on here, so I can't say if that's realistic. I've already given more than I ever did to Reddit and consider it money well spent.
Ultimately if we end up "over funded" then once we've got some savings built up, I'd like to re-donate that to the projects we use (like lemmy)
If it helps provide resources to get other services like the ones that were suggested, that would also be great. But knowing we're helping the developers would also be a win by me, even if I don't agree with their politics.
That's basically how I feel as well. We'll put it to the community before we do anything though.
@otter this is amazing!
Subscribed monthly.
I don't know if I'm missing it somewhere, but many banks now let folks set up recurring interac e-transfers. Just set a monthly $5 with my bank.
Thank you, we'll see about including that information on the donation page.
Maybe we can link to the guides for some common banks so that people know what the process will be like for them
$20 on the way. Thanks for the work you folks are doing. I greatly appreciate it.
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone involved in formalizing this. Really helps to know that lemmy.ca will be support and stable for a while to come. I really also love the census you did. Would love to see that continue. I've signed up to support monthly through GitHub.
I'm going to brain-dump some suggestions that come to mind for the future:
Re: open collective, we looked at it but it seemed limited for Canadians. I liked that aspect of it too, so I'm working on a grafana dashboard for us to try and do something similar.
Glad to hear it. A Grafana dashboard sounds cool!
I have notes for next year's version :)
This is good feedback! I know the team is working on improving this, and while it might take some time to streamline the process, that sounds like a solid plan
Yep, I still have my account for local groups that don't exist elsewhere. It would be amazing to be able to migrate them elsewhere. I haven't explored in some time, but when I was looking around last year the private group / facebook-esque platforms had some work to do. As more people move to the fediverse, I'm hoping there's more momentum to get that work done.
Pixelfed as an alternative to Instagram is strong now. There is also Mobilizon for events, which I'll have to explore some more
Since I'm not as familiar with BookWyrm yet, would it be helpful to have an additional instance for it?
I didn't know about NammaYatri.in, it sounds cool! Even if we don't end up supporting it directly, I expect such projects to find a good home here without the influence of shareholders/profit
Thanks for the response! I think Pixelfed would be a great addition, since it will probably be popular. I'm not so sure about BookWyrm. Its network is fairly healthy, and it's usually used as an alternative to Amazon's Goodreads, but it maybe one that is worth surveying the community about.
Looking forward to Fedecan's future!
Good to know, thank you :)
Yay for future potential pixelfed!
I didn't expect Github Sponsors to have no fees attached. I'll probably just do an etransfer though.
Happy cake day! 🎂
Ooh, it's my Fuck Spez anniversary? Nice!
Congratulations folks!
Congratulations! I will put in a little donation this weekend.
Have my little 5$ donation on github sponsors. It was just a one timer, but i will see if i can do more next time :) and just a question can someone contribute to the guides and learning resources? Because i would like to contribute there if i can.
Totally! We set up the website with collaboration in mind so that anyone can help write the guides + iteratively improve upon them. This should ease the workload and allow everyone to weigh in on the best way to present the information. The website supports internationalization, so we can have the guides in different languages too.
I'll make another post here later to get feedback on the planned structure / contribution process. I can tag you in that post if you would like :)
Yes would definitly like to contribute and even help translate it to german if its wanted. And you probably noticed it already but i made already a pr about a guide
Yes I see it now!
I'll check about getting that merged in, thank you so much :)
Thanks a lot! If it isnt in your style that you imagined of the page, please let me know i will try to adjust to it then :)
No problem, I imagine we will try to add content first and then improve the style and organization over time
Not at all, that's fair to ask!
Right now the focus is on moving to our new hardware, with some more details in the body of this post.
https://lemmy.ca/post/36540245
Once that's done we will be able to spin up additional services much more easily, and it will also change our estimated financial situation (donations vs. costs etc.)
We've also been busy the past few months with other things (especially me) and so I haven't been able to post updates as often as I would have wanted to. Thankfully I've got a lot more time in the new year so that should be different moving forward :)
Was there a certain aspect you wanted to hear back on? I can write up more details on that in the meantime
Pixelfed is most likely to be the next one, and we haven't ruled out anything yet. It depends on what's popular and what there is a need for (ex. someone else isn't already hosting)
We've researched and/or done some prep for Bookwyrm, Loop, Friendica, Sublinks, and Mobilizon. The exact list is uncertain, but the migration will give us lots of room to grow. I'm thinking once we announce one, we can ask what people want next.
Not "Fedican"? Because I've never seen it called the "Fedeverse".
Think Federated Canada, not Fediverse Canada.
It also felt more French / bilingual friendly.
I shall donate as soon as I'm back at my computer where I have my banking stuff! I have just two questions for Otter:
Much thanks!
I should pick a specific rock sometime! When I walk by the water, sometimes I pick up a cool rock to commemorate the event. Eventually they find their way back outside.
For fish, it might be the neon tetra
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_tetra
Do you accept crypto donations? Been mining XMR to heat my house this winter and am looking to donate the proceeds.
While it's supported by one of the donation platforms we are using, we haven't set it up yet
I'll pass this along to the team for more discussion :)
and thank you!
Donating a monthly $5 through Github Hopefully you get some more to fill the money requirement.