2w ago

September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations

blog.mastodon.world September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations

It's been a long while since I wrote a blog post. Some things have happened, which I will write about, and also we need to talk about fin...

The latest blog post about our .world and the Fedihosting Foundation. As you can read in the blog, the donations are no longer covering our running costs. If you are able to spare a few Euro's or dollars or whatever currency, please check the list of our donation platforms in the blog.

Edit: I will add these to the blog: https://bunq.me/fhf (for EU bank transfers) https://github.com/sponsors/Fedihosting-Foundation (Github Sponsor)

125 comments

If I wasn't trying to save every dollar I had to afford food, I'd shoot it all your way. Especially with all the posting I've done here and hosting I've taken up. Might not be able to do anything myself but I've got some friends who probably can and who might owe me a favor. Sandblasting this across my friendslist.
- I get the feeling.
  I put in 10€ for you, now you don't have to feel bad :)

I’m trying to understand who (and where) to donate to here.
The blog post talks about various costs for the Worlds communities - the highest of which is server costs, and one line item is for “Monthly contribution to the FHF”. Then below, the donation links say “As a reminder, you can donate to FHF here”. So are those links for donating only to FHF? The Patreon link goes to “Mastodon.world (Fedihosting Foundation)”.
Some clarity here would be helpful so it’s easy for folks to understand who needs donations and where they can help with that.
- The FHF is the foundation owning all instances (https://fedihosting.foundation/hosted/). So the costs are for running all the .world instances. The contribution to FHF is the costs for running the non-profit foundation itself.
  The Patreon was setup when mastodon.world was the only instance... haven't renamed it yet.

The spamming troll made me realize, we don't have any sort of posting limits? Limiting contributions to something humanly possible, like say, one every thirty seconds, would help cut down on that stuff. Maybe could base it on IP address, so multiple accounts couldn't be used to partially get around it?
Most people would never even realize the limit is there.
- Lemmy lacks essentially all mature moderation and administration controls a forum/social media platform would need to survive the broader internet back in 2014. Nevermind 2025.
  It's quite unfortunate.
  The only savings grace is how small Lemmy is, it's exposure is incredibly narrow right now.
  Fediverse software in general tends to not be that performance friendly either. Leading to extreme hosting costs to scale up to even a meager number of users.and then fans out some level of duplicate resource requirements to federated instances.
  Linearly, if lemmy.world (_{15k MAU) was the size of reddit (}400mill MAU, being very conservative). It would cost ~$14,000,000/m in compute. Of course, the real number would be much higher due to scale ability complexities/technology. But either way that's a lot of $$$.
  Anyways, not to be a Debby downer, it's just hard not to feel defeated by some of these things. And the tasks to make things better are massive.
  Things are always getting better of course.
  
  I had a look around the code a while ago, and not only is it lacking in moderation and administration, it's also very much lacking in the distributed computing department.
  It's essentially set up in a way that all instances store close to all of the data and that with more instances the traffic and compute costs also scale terribly that way.
  Lemmy is pretty close to the limit of its technical capacity.
  I wish they had set Lemmy up as a bunch of basically phpBB forums with federated single-sign-on and frontend that can access the backend of all the separate forums transparently. That way each instance would have to only moderate, store and serve their own content instead of multiplying all the work for each instance.
  Case in point: The €1950/month that the .worlds cost is close to €1 per active user per month. That's a crazy amount.
  For a phpBB forum with ~2000 active users you'd expect to pay maybe €50 per month.
- we do have some limits in place, but lemmy only allows rate limits per ip, and those are counted in each backend process independently. I'm currently working on implementing better rate limits in our load balancer.
  due to rate limits historically not working at all or not working properly, there are still various instances without decent limits. additionally, these rare limits only apply to local users. federated activities are not limited within lemmy. we recent added some fairly high limits to our automod to catch some of these cases and it's been working alright so far.
  
  Wouldn't it be an idea to enable auto-deletion of messages after a set amount of time?
- Could have a truthworthiness score that can increase posting limits in the backend.
  
  Perhaps you know, but commenting anyway for those who are new and don't, you can visit anyone's profile and see their modlog and a vibe check. May help inform how genuine someone may be on here.

I've started evaluate all free (as in freedom) services to match my entertainment subscriptions (I.e. netflix) and this ended up being avg 5$/mo min wage for all free services that I use which is very reasonable expense. All things don't even add up to 100$/mo in my case and the value much outweighs that!
Bless be the foss priests 🙏

Can we avoid payment provider middleman fees with EU bank transfers?
- https://bunq.me/fhf
  
  Awesome! Monthly recurring transfer set. 💪

The first 4 people who click this link will get a free membership to the fedihosting foundation patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/mastodonworld/redeem/f/E235F16A97
Edit: Downvoting support for the fediverse?
- Your comment has really been buried under all that spam. Didn't think I could redeem it 16 hours later. Thanks a lot.
- Yeah.. on PieFed.world we can see who downvoted..
  
  Pretty sure you can on Lemmy too as I’ve been banned from a community simply for downvoting something in it.
- Let‘s gooo!

I was laid off a few months ago, but once I'm up and running again, I'll drop some coin.
In the meantime, I would love to help on a technical level. I have docker experience, but limited and would love to relearn ansible since it has been a few years. Let me know how I can help!
- Such a mood I would love to contribute to projects and expand my skills and experience but I don't know how to get on the ground level. I have docker and C experience but its been a while since I've applied them.

Set up a recurring donation. Lemmy and Mastodon are great and I want them to stick around.

!taneggs@lemmy.ca proudly offers support. Pikas love grass roots!

I see your preferred donation platform is euro based, do you get good $ to eu exchange? or shoul i go patreon?
- Payments are handled by Stripe or Paypal for both platforms so that doesn't matter

I'm really confused by what link donates to who. Can you just give us a simple link that's like "click here to donate to lemmy.world"?
- The Bunq link goes directly to the bank account of the organization running Lemmy.world, mastodon.world, and piefed.world.
  
  And you don't need to use bunq's UI to make a transfer from your own bank, just the IBAN (which is revealed after clicking the bunq link)

Question about BUNQ: There's this string that looks like an IBAN (NL78 BUNQ 2108 3219 85). If I send money using a recurring bank transfer to that, will it work? Will substantial fees be incurred as a result?
- Yes it will work. And this way there will be no fees.
  
  Oh, fantastic. I'll double my monthly donation. Thanks!

Done.

I have doubled my donation!
- Did that make it go up?
  
  Yeah, it did, I donate monthly. Are you doing your part? 🤨

Happy to help, I made a donation.

Is the situation changing for you since the post?
- Yes! I think we might even have 500 to 1000 EUR more than we spend this month, so we can save that for next months. A lot of these are one-time donations, so I'll have to see how much we'll have next month, I'll keep you updated on the blog.
  
  When I get paid I really want to support but I've been jobless for a while. I hope .world gets the resources it needs!

Saved, upvotes and commented to find this post easier

Hello. Is GitHub sponsor a good way to donate? Do all funds go to Fedihosting? Other link shows currency in Euros but I am in USA and want to donate $
Thanks!
- Yes GH is a good way, but I'm sure you can use $ on Patreon as well?
  
  I was looking for a $20 tier on Patreon, but maybe I should try GitHub then.

I've setup a monthly contribution on GH. Only 10AUD/month sorry but it is sustainable for me.
I use Linux, Docker, etc, professionally all day every day and can lend at least few hours a month to technical help if you want. Also happy to moderate some communities if they are lacking (I love power trips /s). I don't use any social media outside of Lemmy (Abandoned Reddit completely, and have no interest in Facebook, Twitter, etc).
Thanks for the hard work everyone.

Is there a guarantee that none of these donations go to the tankie dev?
- Isn’t that a .ml issue, not a .world issue?
  
  Many lemmy communities give money to the devs
  
  Okay, but what if a dev on .world is a tankie? Who can risk their money going towards a functioning community website if there's any chance someone I hate might cover rent and groceries?
- I'm assuming that you're referring to the Lemmy developers. FHF supports Lemmy development with a monthly donation of €50, same as we do for Mastodon development.
  If it makes you feel better, there are enough other people donating who don't mind some or all of their donation amount going towards Lemmy development to offset your donation not being used for Lemmy development contributions.
  It's not worth the effort to set up independent purpose-bound donation pools to separate donations from people unwilling to support certain people/organizations, as the end result would be the same, except a lot more maintenance/accounting overhead. Calculating with the current expenses of €1,700/month, this is less than 3% of the total donations we'd need to cover our bills.
  
  What a passive agressive response
  It isn't worth donating if my money goes to .ml admins, any amount
  It's morally wrong to give money to people who use their platform to spout fascist propaganda
- Same lol
  Context for those unaware
- Tbh, for me idc. Better a tankie than a fascist. And better an ancom than a tankie.
  Whichever tankie allies with ancoms to fight the fascist, is my friend.
  But, indeed unfortunately, a ton of self-proclaimed tankies actually are fascists.
  
  Meeting in the middle only ever seems to benefit right wingers.
  I'm done doing it.

I am sorry for being poor
E: I have donated 2 euro

Donated. Hope to see the project continue well into the future.

Y'all do great work. Best of luck on the donations!

Is there a bottom limit for bank transfer, below which they would not be profitable? Can I set up a monthly payment for, for example, 1 or even 0,25€?
- No for bank transfer there's no bottom limit

Why are users going down? Is the fediverse in danger?
- afaik the decrease in users has mostly been on mastodon.world, where the suspected reason is to a large degree requiring registration applications to prevent spam bots. this seems to scare off a lot of users unfortunately. i'm not involved in the mastodon stuff, but afaik there is currently no system similar to what we have on lemmy or piefed to automatically accept applications after certain checks were successful.
- In total the fediverse is stable or slightly growing. ActivityPub is how fediverse instances exchang information. More and more platforms are getting stood up and there are also a bunch of instances of those platforms.
  Platforms are things like Friendica, Lemmy, Mastodon, PeerTube, Funkwhale, Hubzilla, Misskey, and now Pifed. Instances are things like lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works.
  This approach was intentional. No single platform or service controls everything and if someone starts misbehaving it's easy enough to go elsewhere.
  That's not to say there aren't downaides. We have a ton of communities for similar topics on different instances and/or platforms. Each of these communities need to be moderated, have an active user base, etc.

What CMS do you use for the blog page?
- https://writefreely.org/

Unfortunately I just had emergency gallbladder surgery after spending my entire summer out of work and thinking I was dying. I have nothing to give right now.

There you go. But I really wonder why ko-fi needs e-mail. Had to go rummage around for the mail associated with this account. Almost stopped me from donating.
- Bare minimum KYC (know your customer) to pay lip service to the idea of preventing money laundering. This will be the case for all payment service providers. If you're in the EU, a bank transfer is trivial and avoids middleman fees.

I'm not able to help out as volunteer at the moment since I just started with a new job, but might be able to help some time later. I've donated something for the "various small resources" and will be increasing my monthly donation amount.

the ai thing doesnt work for me since the update. Help?
- There is no "AI thing" here
  
  the story writer no longer woks

Proposal: add custom animations in posts, let people pay for it. EDIT: like, dumb silly dancing frogs flying around the screen when opening some thread
- I'm not sure about silly frogs, but I think showing something like a supporter icon or something could help? I'll try making a quick PoC.
  Edit: I wrote something that takes the members of OpenCollective, gets their Fediverse username and then, displays it in the frontend
  
  Edit 2: GitHub for HTTP server serving usernames https://github.com/QazCetelic/supporter-shoutout, patch for frontend not included
- Develop it yourself, the instance hosts are trying to pay to run the servers not edit the codebase. If anything, they're probably looking to jump ship off the Lemmy platform over to https://piefed.world/ now that it's up and running.
- Please no... At least have a switch to turn it off or something... animations moving in and around the UI are very distracting for some neurodivergent folks, myself included.

Despite the spamming, the banned guy's comment is right.
Not giving a cent to censorship and genocide collaborators.
- I mean, I get being reluctant to donate or not being able to, but using a software someone worked to develop and a platform someone pays to maintain AND acting high and mighty about it (on that very platform) is rich. The entitlement on some of you people is staggering, I swear.
- Then why not also refrain from commenting?
  
  I'm against genocide and anyone who thinks they can stop me from talking about it can go fuck themselves, that's why.
- Yeah, we won't give a cent to MAGA fascists. They censor everything. Fuck them.
  But Lemmy, yes, all it needs.
  
  Sure, give your money to the Blue MAGA

Donate to .world? Let me get riiight on that.

This platform needs more political and thought diversity, as of now it's far-left only. I will donate when rational discussion happens without promoting political violence.
- That's the most right wing thing I've read all day. Give me stuff or I'll sit here and watch you die.
  
  "Say what I want you to say or I'll assassinate you in public with a .30-06 round."
- Fuck off Nazi scum
  No "rational" discussion can occur without kicking out fascists!
  They have been responsible for 80 million deaths. Rot in hell nazis.
- Fuck off Nazi scum
  No "rational" discussion can occur without kicking out fascists!
  They have been responsible for 80 million deaths. Rot in hell nazis.

125 comments