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ernest @kbin.social

/kbin project management costs, financing, future plans

I wrote the first line of code for /kbin on January 14, 2021. Around this time, I started working remotely and decided that the time I used to spend commuting to the office would be devoted to /kbin. Throughout this entire period, /kbin has been a hobby project that I developed in my free time. It was also when Lemmy started federating. The full history is available on GitHub. The Polish instance - or rather its prototype - was created on 2021-09-08.

By the end of 2022, I decided to take this a bit more seriously. The work that had brought me much satisfaction began to tire me out - anyone who's experienced burnout likely knows what I'm talking about. I needed a breather and a sense of doing things my way. I had some savings put aside, so I could work on this full-time. The amount of code might not reflect this, but it's only a small part of the things that need attention in such a project ;)

I don't know if it had any impact, but on January 4, 2023, I received information that the project had qualified for the NGI0 Entrust program. I had applied for funding a few months earlier. Currently, I have outlined my milestones in the Roadmap. The plan was to gradually complete each stage (after finishing one of them, I can apply for a funds release). However, due to the situation and how /kbin has developed in recent weeks, I had to completely change my priorities. As a result, I have started each stage, but none is polished enough for me to honestly apply for a payout. I'll need to address this promptly.

The fact that I could take certain steps amidst all this confusion is solely thanks to your support. The kindness I've encountered here will be remembered for a lifetime :) My buymeacoffee account currently has 818 supporters, who have donated $11,320. This is a lot of money, and for a while, I'll be able to sleep peacefully, not worrying about maintaining kbin.social.

Nevertheless, this money is meant for project development. Every expense will be documented in monthly reports. If necessary, I can also provide insight into the invoices. Things have been so heated recently that I consider the spending over the past months to be a failure. Most of the costs need to go to S3+Cloudfront, where costs due to the traffic increased from $2-3 per month to $1,000. This is about half a year of basic servers in the current stack. But in hindsight - so much has happened that faster migration was impossible. However, this has certainly accelerated the process.

None of this would have been possible without the contributors and project guardians, and without Piotr, with whom we spent many hours and sleepless nights trying to stabilize the situation and bring it to its current state. This time we're much better prepared for potential surprises. I hadn't set the terms of collaboration before and I admit, I had some concerns when we arranged a call to discuss this. However, it turned out that within the foundation, Piotr introduced a "Pay what you can" financing model, whether it's $1 or $100 a month. As I mentioned earlier, this is a huge relief for me and we started from scratch regarding security matters.

Many of you asked me about the possibility of recurring support. I wasn't entirely convinced, especially since the current account balance should maintain the instance. However, I think it would be irresponsible of me not to consider it. /kbin has grown to a level where I can't foresee everything that will happen. It would be great if we could cover monthly costs with Patreon / Liberapay. All funds from Buy Me a Coffee will be transferred to this pool, but from now on, I'll treat it as buying me a coffee... or a beer... literally ;)

For me, this also means maintaining critical zones for the project. I see this as a long-distance run, so I've decided to allocate:

$100 monthly - donation to Piotr's foundation "Fundacja Technologie dla Ludzi" - I really encourage you to support it, they're really doing a lot for the fediverse.
$24 monthly - donation to Codeberg - a great ecosystem for free projects. We've been making quite a buzz there recently.

I also want to support contributors and creators around /kbin as much as possible - but I'll do this privately, and for now, I can only afford symbolic amounts.

 
    
|                                                   |            |              |   $  |
| ------------------------------------------------- | ---------- | ------------ | ---- |
| Hetzner Jun 2, 2023                               | €131.63    | one-time     | 145  |
| Hetzner Jul 2, 2023                               | €246.74    | one-time     | 271  |
| OVH 24 cze 2023                                   | 2246.66 zł | 6 months     | 553  |
| OVH 1 lip 2023                                    | 904.63 zł  | monthly      | 223  |
| OVH domains                                       | 116.43 zł  | annually     | 30   |
| AWS (S3+Cloudfront) July 3, 2023                  | $1079.21   | one-time     | 1080 |
| AWS current                                       | $320.45    | one-time     | 321  |
| Mailgun 2023-07-02                                | $49.76     | one-time     | 50   |
| Testing enviroments, demo instances, landing page | $130       | monthly      | 130  |
| FTDL                                              | $100       | monthly      | 100  |
| Codeberg                                          | 95.33 zł   | monthly      | 24   |
| Yubico 2x YubiKey 5C NFC Jun 22, 2023             | €135.30    | one-time     | 149  |
| Accounting and legal advice                       | $100       | one-time (?) | 50   |
| Taxes in Poland                                   | ???        |              |      |

Thank you once again for that. I will respond to your questions, but it may be delayed as I have a few important tasks I want to focus on. Soon we will also write more about the cluster and the conclusions we have drawn from creating infrastructure with Piotr. Then it will be time for the first release of /kbin.

110 comments

  • First and foremost: Thank you @ernest for your incredible work and dedication.

    1. Pay yourself a salary. Whatever you feel is appropriate & covers your personal costs. Developing and maintaining /kbin seems to be a full time job (or at least will become one)
    2. THANK YOU FOR YOUR TRANSPARENCY. That's why we are here. This builds such a huge trust with the community. Whatever you need, we'll be here.

  • As always, you're so considerate and thorough. Looking forward to seeing what becomes of /kbin.

  • Would you recommend that some of us move to other kbin instances? Or should we stay on kbin.social to help it grow?

    Thank you for all your hard work. I would like more people to discover kbin, instead of the other software developed by the tankies.

    • An interesting point of discussion for sure... but as long as federation is working, I don't see why people shouldn't try out other instances. We shouldn't be trying to replace reddit or whatever with 1 big monolithic instance... spreading out the cost/maintenance is the only way to survive... unless you happen to be a massive corporation with the moolah to monopolize an entire datacenter.

      • I fully agree. I understand the fediverse is new for most people, but we want to encourage decentralization. @debounced @ernest

      • I think there's a very interesting area for discussion as to whether the fediverse should do more to bake in the idea that instances should be small and co-operate more closely (portable identities, opt-in discovery mechanisms built into the protocol, post history migrations etc) and that we should actively be working against the centralisation of traditional commercial/VC/BigTech approaches.

    • I felt slightly frustrated when I tried some Lemmy apps and they only offer a few largest instances in the initial setup and leave people to discover/find smaller instances by themselves.

      It is understandable that they don't want to present a thousand choices and confuse people, or get people to sign up for an instance that disappears a week later. Also, larger instances tend to get a snowball effect by receiving more donations / volunteers and scale better, other nodes are also more likely to help them if there are e.g. federation problems.

      However this effectively promotes an centralized ecosystem that both depends on and burdens a small number of key instances.

    • I'm pretty happy with the .social instance for now, I assume you'd have to find an insurance with admins who are transparent. Old mate Ernest is pretty upfront so that's a big selling point to me when deciding which instance to start on :)

  • Kbin has replaced Reddit for me, and for that I am truly grateful. Ernest, you've made something wonderful here. Please do whatever you need to do to make this effort sustainable so that we have a longer term place to talk to others and share the things that bring us joy.

  • All funds from Buy Me a Coffee will be transferred to this pool, but from now on, I'll treat it as buying me a coffee... or a beer... literally ;)

    Get yourself something strong, you’ve earned it!

  • Thanks for the update. In my opinion, your target should be to raise enough funds for you to be able to draw a reasonable salary along with supporting kbin's development.

  • Thanks for the donation links. I was wondering where I could officially go to give you some money for use other than drugs (referring to caffeine or alcohol 😆).

  • Thank you for the update and thoroughness! That growth from may to june is insane, massive props for keeping this all working and afloat!

    • @laurens That was quite a ride. I can't remember the last time I had to sleep for a solid 12 hours straight :p

  • I really like kbin and in very happy that there are alternatives to greedy corporations run by narcissistic morons (you know who I'm talking about). I really hope the fediverse can establish itself as a real alternative to the ad-infested hellscape that is modern social media. You're definitely making a positive impact here.

  • Thanks for your hard work. Kbin is a good project, and I'm glad to be supporting it in some small way.

  • @ernest, you have my monthly donation. I hope it helps. Let us know how else we can help. The community can support you as much as you're supporting us.

  • Did yearly donation via librapay, it's a worthy project. Really appreciate your transparency and all the good work you do @ernest!

  • Great! I just signed up for monthly donations. Glad to support the efforts and thank you for the work you are doing.

  • £85 pcm? Surely such a supporter deserves their posts to be highlighted in gold with big arrows pointing everyone at them!

    Remember your time has value, I much appreciate your efforts.

  • All funds from Buy Me a Coffee will be transferred to this pool, but from now on, I'll treat it as buying me a coffee... or a beer... literally ;)

    I'm so happy to see that you're running strongly, and that my measly $50 that was intended to relieve stress will now be allocated to beer - which relieves stress.

    Thank you for your continued efforts! 🍻

  • Thanks for the numbers! It's always interesting for someone wanting to dig more seriously into the self-hosting of fediverse tools.

    Well, I think it puts an end to the idea of ever federating with big names like facebook. It would cost way too much money and resources.

    • Actually it doesn't really work like that. It would also depend how much interaction there was between kbin users and the users on Threads. The increase in hosting costs should be manageable as it has more to do with the number (and activity) of users on the local instance, than with the size of the fediverse.

      Note for example kbin is already federated with Mastodon which has 10,000+ instances.

  • Loving the commitment, honesty and transparency!! You have done an amazing job, and I am confident that you are giving your baby (kbin) the best possible care and future.

    But do be mindful of your situation and try to take care of yourself, we wouldn’t want you to have another burnout or something similar.

  • Thanks for your work! And for great communication too. Just brushed off my old Patreon account :)

  • Then it will be time for the first release of /kbin.

    This gave me some feel-good chills. Thanks ernest, you da man.

  • @ernest Really cool that you accept Liberapay! I activated a monthly donation! It's not much but hopefully if a lot of people do the same, that'll help you a lot! :)

  • @ernest That's a great project, by the way. And I love we're taking the internet back.

  • You're an amazing human being and I am in awe of what you have managed to create! The Patreon was my easiest join ever and I'm happy to hear that buying you a coffee will actually buy you a coffee (or other tasty beverage) going forward :)

  • @ernest, as others are saying, if you enjoy working on kbin, do not hesitate to pay yourself a salary from donations and allow them to be recurring in order to make it stable. If the money becomes enough to pay staff, get some legal advice and setup a structure to do so.

    Your project is a major boon to the fediverse and if you enjoy working on it more than your current job, I'm sure the community would be very happy to finance kbin as your new job. If you consider this a hobby and are afraid turning it into something paid might take all the fun out of it, I can definitely understand.

    Find out what'll work for you. Me and a bunch of others are rooting for you :)

  • @ernest thanks for updating us, and for all your hard work. I'm glad you can get some sleep now -and it's nice that we can buy you a beer!

  • I am in awe of your commitment, long term. I think my jaw dropped with the transparency. It's so informative, it breaks down walls, and creates so much trust. I will help with as many coffees as I can! @ernest

  • Great work so far mate, it's take really exciting to see how far the project has come. I'm really happy with the hundreds of tickets we've managed to get through, from UI tweaks, new features to bug fixes.

    It's still early days but each new thing we fix makes kbin a more useful and enticing offer, hoping a heap now people start using it so we can get it into more hands.

    Excited for the future 🦙🦙🦙

110 comments