Which begs the question, how do you make your money? Do you have a separate job … or do you make any money by running this instance? And also, what are your costs in being able to maintain this instance? Do you break even? Are you running a loss? Are you making a profit?

I currently have a day job not related to this at all. I'm a software developer by day. I currently accept donations that go towards the hosting of this instance. The users so far have been very generous, so we have enough to carry us for around 6 months (from what I remember), based on current usage. As long as we don't get any huge spikes in usage (and i'm likely talking about in the thousands of new users joining), we should be ok for a while. If donations slow down I will be able to maintain the instance on my own, but ideally i'm hoping it can run off donations. I will be as transparent as I can be about this instances financials, as I plan on doing a monthly (maybe every other month?) "State of the Instance" type post, that I've seen done on mastodon, and some other lemmy instances too.

My questions are two fold because I would like to know if you are benefiting from this work … and I would be the first to congratulate you on that.

I have no plans to ever profit from this. All donations will 100% go towards our hosting costs. If, for whatever reason, this instances changes owners, I will transfer whatever donations are left over to the new owner as well.

If you do need funds … I would be more than willing to donate, subscribe or sign onto a subscription to keep this instance running.

Thank you! You can see from the donation link above how much we currently have. As I said earlier, we've had quite a few generous donors, so I'll let that up to you! I'll be adding my hosting expenses into opencollective as well so that will be visible too.

Hopefully I've answered most of your questions? If there's anything I've missed or if you have other questions, let me know!