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.
And if they are scoped realistically.
The contraction we're seeing in the tech space this year is in large part a consequence of venture capitalist funding. A significant portion of tech sites were being funded at a loss, with the idea that profitability could be achieved after establishing a userbase. Rising interest rates pushed the VCs to put pressure on the companies they invested in: "no more free lunch, realize our gains now". This is why you see a rash of tech sites abruptly restructuring (Discord) or completely collapsing (gfycat). Reddit falls somewhere between the two, because it's likely they're seeking an IPO and they don't care about the fate of the website once they cash out. Twitter is ruled by an emperor with no clothes. Facebook can't make as much money as it did prior to the added government scrutiny, and the Zuck has been frantically trying to diversify his company these past few years.
This is a long-winded way of saying that ernest deserves a lot of praise here for being realistic and up front with the operating costs of running the largest kbin instance. lemmy and kbin draw inspiration from the social media platforms that came before them, but can't budget for growth the same way that their predecessors did. It's not going to be cheap, they aren't going to get the free lunch that prior social media platforms had, and ernest needs to proceed with the well-being of both himself and his project in mind.