Adding my internal monologue here:
- it would be a shame to close THE nsfw lemmy server, especially since it's so new and at the same time it got so much traction
- however, because it got so much traction, the costs will rise quickly (both in terms of money and personal time invested)
- to all you porn enjoyers (ie everyone), you can't expect this lemmy server to survive by its own - there is no company behind it to finance it, there are no investors, there are no ads
- the only way this could work is if a lot of the people coming here would donate
I have close to 20 years of IT experience, growing from a stupid dev to a stupid manager. One of my last positions was engineering manager for a Twitch clone, which had pretty small numbers of users - the most we saw was 10k concurrent users on a stream. I'm saying all this not to boost, but to convince you that I'm not pulling things out of my ass - costs can easily reach 5 figures monthly if the growth of this server continues.
Now, if you have a phone or laptop, and the internet connection needed to visit this lemmy server, you do have spare change. If you could donate 12 dollars or euros PER YEAR, spread out in 12 equal payments of 1 dollar or euro per month, you would help immensely. Really. 1 moneys per month. You can afford it. You can be a fisherman in Uganda and still afford 1 dollar per month. You have enough coins thrown around in your car to make several months' payments. So do that now, go to Patreon and set-up a monthly payment of 1$, if you want to see this server still around a couple of years from now.
@yay, if you do want to donate the server to someone, here's some ideas on how to make the server work and grow:
- have a k8s setup (k3s on a couple of nodes works really well)
- PostgreSQL HA (from Bitnami) on the cluster
- separate storage box (or boxes, with CephFS or some other distributed filesystem)
- another separate nsfw server for scat/gore/other weird shit so lemmynsfw doesn't get defederated
- consider setting up a company to own all of this, in case of legal issues
"Trying" is too big of a word. Not caring is more appropriate. If someone wants the site then very good, if not then I don't mind. I've put it in minimal hardware usage mode, and it can coast along for a very long time. However, with how the Lemmy experiment unfolded up to now, PornLemmy will probably not be the only one doing so. Development so far has been like a case study on how wrong things can go when devs go by their own without any functional requirements, software design documents, planning, management, etc.