Well hello there, I hope you are having a good time and that apart from the shaky recent update, discuss.tchncs.de serves you well! 🚀
tl;dr
tchncs is doing wonderfully in terms of donations, but I have reason to worry about an ongoing decline. Please don’t feel pressured but if some of you would help looking out that it doesn’t fall below a certain threshold, that’d be amazing. :)
Many of you are already using tchncs services elsewhere, but for those of you who are new, I’d like to briefly mention that this service is powered by donations of its users. By donating a small monthly fee, you ensure that I will be able to keep paying for the infrastructure and its upgrades, as well as investing my time, trying to keep the thing rolling.
Donating is 100% voluntary and not each and every one of you need to do it – also for now, there is no critical need for new donors.
If that’s the case, why am I even pointing this out?
For a couple of months, our dear Elon (and later /u/spez) gave us not only waves of new users, but also motivated them / existing users to boost donations quite a bit. In fact, it is kinda unreal how much you kind people have donated to tchncs over the time.
The server-costs have increased and unlikely will go down soon again. Even tho it happened before, the past month was quite weak compared to the previous trend. Of course it is still much more than many most fediverse admins sadly have to deal with(!), but also this month started weaker than usual and I worry that this time it might become a new trend.
At tchncs.de/donate, I give you (maybe too) deep insights about the tchncs funding situation. Here you have what I just wrote as a screenshot:
🖼 very bright for darktheme screenshot of the previous months in donations 🖼
Screenshot from july 12, 2024
There is also tracked workhours on the site and together they even form dynamic goals with some hacky bash scripts. 😁
So what do I ask for?!
If, and only if you can afford it and if you really want to, please consider checking from time to time as to whether tchncs currently achieves goal #1 and ideally goal #2 (hw upgrades). It is important to keep a buffer for new hardware. And if not needed for new hardware, you are helping your fellow admin (me) with day to day expenses and ideally, savings for bad times.
…so that’s all, this got longer than anticipated, sorry for that. Please do not feel pressured, as of now it’s all fine. Just trying to make sure it stays this way. ✌
Thanks for your work!!
@milan@discuss.tchncs.de thank you for the insights. Will we get federation option with threads in the future? @milan
There are many good arguments against it floating around… but also some in favor for it… looking at previous discussions and polls, I am afraid that this would cut our userbase in half.
I don’t think (or, let’s hope…) that the current decline is a general overall decline, but rather a before summer decline like in 2023 before vacation where people tend to spend money on their and their families’ recreation.
