We recently crossed the first anniversary for many of us on Lemmy and the Fediverse, and we are thrilled to announce an important milestone: we have started a new registered not-for-profit organization! The organization is registered as ‘Federated Open Communications Canada’, and we will go by ‘Fedecan’ in our day-to-day operations.
Over the past few months, we have been working behind the scenes on the necessary paperwork, bylaws, and other administrative tasks to get the organization rolling. Thanks to the invaluable feedback from our previous check-in, we decided to take the leap and register federally, which will allow us to operate across Canada more easily. For more details, you can check out the FAQs on our new website.
Resuming Donations
With this important step completed, we are now ready to resume accepting donations. We have set up several donation options to accommodate different preferences on convenience and fees. Our first priority is to reimburse those who have been covering server and other costs, and to set up regular financial updates. We are open to adding more donation options, so please let us know if there is an option you prefer.
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Donation Page: (fedecan.ca/donate)
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Alternate Donation page without embedded elements: (fedecan.ca/donate-private)
Our current costs
- Server hosting - $150/month
- Domains registrations - $50/year
- Non profit requirements - $500 one time
Our Next Steps:
- Reimburse individuals who have covered server and operational costs and to set up more regular financial updates
- Collaboratively creating guides and learning resources about Lemmy and the Fediverse (ex. how things work, data/privacy details, and best practices for moderating or running instances, etc.) + translations
- Exploring other platforms to run. Some that are on our radar include Sublinks, Pixelfed, and Matrix
- Developing logos, colours, and other branding details based on ideas from the community
What we want to know:
- Do you have any questions, comments, or concerns? This will also help us expand our FAQs
- Which other platforms would you like us to explore?
- Do you prefer any other donation method?
We want to help build a better online experience for everyone, and that requires an organization with a strong foundation. This should be the first step in that process.
Thank you for everything so far, and we look forward to seeing you around! 🥳
The Fedecan Team
This is great, but I’d also like to have an idea of what is needed to support this on an individual level. I know that isn’t easy since this is just starting up, but we should have an idea of what’s needed individually once things have been running for a while. Suggested donations would make it easier to know what’s appropriate to keep this afloat.
In the meantime, I’ll do a one-time donation partially to help build a cash reserve (and to support the year of good service I’ve already received).
Thanks again for all your hard work, both in running the server and in getting thos NFP set up.
Agreed, but like you said it’s hard to know right now. We only need around 30 people at $5/mo to cover costs, but will 30 people donate? 🤷
We’ll post a funding update in a month or so once things settle in a bit.
If you’re tight on cash, don’t give it to us.
I mostly posted that to raise visibility. I understand it’s a hard question to answer right now. $5/mo was kind of what I was thinking, but I don’t even know how many accounts/users are on here, so I can’t say if that’s realistic. I’ve already given more than I ever did to Reddit and consider it money well spent.
Ultimately if we end up “over funded” then once we’ve got some savings built up, I’d like to re-donate that to the projects we use (like lemmy)
If it helps provide resources to get other services like the ones that were suggested, that would also be great. But knowing we’re helping the developers would also be a win by me, even if I don’t agree with their politics.
That’s basically how I feel as well. We’ll put it to the community before we do anything though.