Edit edit: pls stop voting we already decided. read the post title. I love blahaj.zone and personally wanted to stay.
EDIT-I feel the need to clarify that I don't really care either way, I have no ambitions to be an instance admin, I just want to do whatever's best/preferredf or the community-
Hello everyone, I'm making this post because I have received a very enticing offer that I think we as a community should consider.
Ruud from lemmy.world has reached out and offered to set up our own instance under the domain of 196.social, hosted on lemmy.world's hardware. This would allow the community to exist as a separate entity from any one instance, while also improving stability, as it would not be impacted by The same volume of hacks or attacks. It would also not be affected by Lemmy.worlds downtime as it would be fully separate.
The one trade-off is that we would have to fund this ourselves. Ruud says he is more than willing to cover the costs initially until we get some sort of funding set up, but after that grace period we would have to crowdsource the money. He says that the expenses of running a one community instance are very low, however. especially if we don't allow account creation, so it would not take many people to fund it per month.
Please vote in the comments whether we should remain on blahaj.zone, or migrate to our own instance.
I would like to acknowledge here that Ada and I, while being part of a marginalized community are both still very privileged.
I also want to make clear that I'm not saying that you need to have decades of experience, or the means to cover the costs by yourself, but rather wanted to point out it's a hard job and you need to have (multiple, qualified) people to do the job for a larger instance. There may also be times when the donations don't 100% cover the costs, and you'll need to have a plan when this happens.
Unfortunately multiply intersectional marginalized people have a lot harder time getting that experience and to have a means to fund such instances. It can additonally be a lot harder for them to find opportunities to gain this experience.
If you do find yourself in a similar situation, and would like an opportunity to gain some experience/training in a LGBTQIA+ / neuro-diverse / marginalized people-friendly community project, please message myself or @ada and we may be able to help.