We are currently the 2nd largest instance in terms of monthly active users. This brings a financial burden and we would appreciate your help about it.
If you want to donate, here’s donation platforms we use:
- Throne.com: No need to register. I tried and received payment. So it works.
- Ethereum: 0x4e4af5dc2f86235ac496542c2a1c00f3c4de40c6
- Monero: 48VYVWPKk65KiDiBaLhvSggKSbDQ4vtdq6HHbDa2HxWLiBWVcZ65gTgMBu7UeSUcm4dasAMMaKHnJNJSgRKi7Q5R5HN9adg
- Trocador.app (multiple cryptocurrencies)
Financial status
Finally, our instance became self-sustainable with donations! We received a lot of donations especially in February. Therefore, I would like to report the financial status here.
| date | description | fiat | ETH | XMR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-06-24 | - load balance server | $430 | 0.002 ETH | 1.3460 XMR (-0.0731 XMR) |
| 2024-06-14 | - main server | $430 (-$75) | 0.002 ETH | 1.4192 XMR |
| 2024-06-13 | + donation | $505 (+$20) | 0.002 ETH | 1.4192 XMR |
| 2024-06-12 | - media storage | $485 (-$25) | 0.002 ETH | 1.4192 XMR |
| 2024-06-06 | + donation | $510 (+$20) | 0.002 ETH | 1.4192 XMR |
| 2024-06-04 | / coin to fiat | $490 (+$473) | 0.002 ETH (-0.125 ETH) | 1.4192 XMR |
| 2024-05-22 | - load balance server | $17 | 0.1276 ETH | 1.4192 XMR (-0.0861 XMR) |
| 2024-05-22 | + donation | $17 | 0.1276 ETH | 1.5050 XMR (+0.1442 XMR) |
| 2024-05-21 | + donation | $17 | 0.1276 ETH | 1.3611 XMR (+1 XMR) |
| 2024-05-17 | + donation | $17 | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3611 XMR (+042069 XMR 🚬) |
| 2024-05-17 | + donation | $17 (+$20) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR |
| 2024-05-15 | - main server | -$3 (-$75) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR |
| 2024-05-13 | - media storage | $72 (-$24) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR |
| 2024-04-28 | + donation | $96 (+$50) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR |
| 2024-04-26 | + donation | $46 (+$20) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR |
| 2024-04-24 | - load balance server | $26 | 0.1276 ETH | 0.3190 XMR (-0.0993 XMR) |
| 2024-04-21 | + donation | $26 (+$50) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.4184 XMR |
| 2024-04-15 | - main server | -$24 (-$65) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.4184 XMR |
| 2024-04-10 | - media storage | $41 (-$19) | 0.1276 ETH | 0.4184 XMR |
| 2024-04-09 | + donation | $60 | 0.1276 ETH (+0.06969 ETH 🙃) | 0.4184 XMR |
| 2024-04-01 | + donations | $60 (+$25) | 0.0579 ETH | 0.4184 XMR (+0.1827 XMR) |
| 2024-03-30 | - load balance server | $35 | 0.0579 ETH | 0.2357 XMR (-0.0890 XMR) |
| 2024-03-04 | + donation | $35 | 0.0579 ETH | 0.3247 XMR (+0.0420 XMR) |
| 2024-03-02 | - main server | $35 (-$65) | 0.0579 ETH | 0.2827 XMR |
| 2024-02-28 | + donation | $100 | 0.0579 ETH (+0.0073 ETH) | 0.2827 XMR |
| 2024-02-27 | - load balance server | $100 | 0.0506 ETH | 0.2827 XMR (-0.1516 XMR) |
| 2024-02-01 | - new server and email provider | $100 (-$75) | 0.0506 ETH | 0.3738 XMR |
| 2024-02-01 | / approximate initial value | $175 | 0.0506 ETH | 0.3738 XMR |
A little note about about this financial status report
- Throne
- it is fiat type and I will only add money here when I withdraw it.
- Cryptocurrencies
- I will truncate numbers to 4 decimal places.
- It may not always be up to date. You can check up to date ETH balance by clicking to it.
- No matter which coin you send from Trocador, the money will merge into Monero.
Hello, team at LemmyNSFW,
I’m delighted to see your instance growing and I completely support the idea of donating to ensure the longevity and quality of this platform. Your hard work in maintaining and developing this instance is very much appreciated.
However, I’d like to bring up the idea of financial transparency within our community. Have you considered using a platform like Open Collective for your donation system? It has been adopted by other instances, including Lemmy.world. You can see an example of how they use it here: https://opencollective.com/mastodonworld
In my opinion, Lemmy.world is a shining example of how a Lemmy instance should operate financially. They provide transparency about their finances, which has greatly contributed to building trust with their users and the platform as a whole.
Considering we’re part of an open-source, decentralized platform, I believe this level of transparency is paramount. It not only helps in building trust but also encourages more users to donate, knowing exactly how their contributions will be utilized.
Moreover, seeing big instances openly donating back to the source code developers could set a wonderful precedent. This act of giving back to those who helped create the foundation of our platform would be a tremendous demonstration of gratitude and community spirit.
Again, I am wholeheartedly in support of donating to this community, and I hope my suggestion will be taken into consideration. Keep up the fantastic work!
Going to have to agree that something like this would be good. Lets people see all in one place where we stand and what is needed.
Yes. And I’m genuinely ok with big staff spends. Spend it on hookers and cocaine for all I care. All is like to see is that some percentage is committed and shown to be given back to the source code developers.
Agreed, there’s nothing wrong with making a living. 👍
I’d love to see if we could get enough donations going to distribute to content creators? Maybe this is a more mainstream instance/general purpose NSFW, but it would be very cool to see an instance giving ownership to its content creators.
Depending on the jurisdictions involved (where the server is hosted and where the admins live), I can imagine there may be very different laws and regulations governing a forum of user-submitted content and a business acting as a publisher and producer of porn content. A great idea, but not as simple as just having the money to do it.
deleted by creator
Thank you for your opinion! I would like to do this too but we don’t use single payment method. Also does Open Collective approve payments or should we trust the admin for this? And do admins attach bills somewhere?
Open collective (of which I have zero affiliation) is working on taking cryptocurrency payments. Last I checked it was in beta.
You can give evidence where you feel it would be beneficial. But yeh. You could always find work arounds.
If it’s something you genuinely want to explore, I’m happy to volunteer some of my time to help you with implementing and managing that.
The key thing I’d like to see in all instances, not just yours, is transparency in income, plus some sort of transparency as to how much that may be given back to the community and the source code development.
Honestly. What’s done with the rest, I care very little.
Can you contact me from Matrix? my address is @xaeg:matrix.org
How big a proportion of potential supporters do you think would prefer to pay in crypto?
I’m in column A, but not column B. Just for “statistical purposes”.
If we were a non-NSFW instance, I wouldn’t add crypto but anonymity is important for some people (me included).
I definitely understand where you’re coming from, I was just attempting to debate cost/value.
Almost half of the supporters donating from crypto, so I don’t think its unnecessary.
I’d probably prefer pay in crypto. Also receive in crypto TBH. Just for anonymity’s sake.
An instance run so good that it caused me to start using my porn account as main account deserves some love and support. Bought a sponsor package on throne.
Thank you for your support buddy 🙏
I support you my friend both monetarily and conceptually.
You’re one of the people I’ve seen from the very beginning. Thank you for your support!
Just saw we’re down, donated on Throne to get us back in the green!
Thank you! 🙏
I joined this instance for the NSFW, but at the moment it is the best performing instance I am on, so I am subscribing to all my tech communities through here as well. In other words, my NSFW account is now my main account. LOL. Going to Patreon for sure.
EDIT: I signed up for $5/month. Keep up the good work!
PS: Would you mind sharing your docker-compose file? I want to deploy a lemmy instance on GCP to help strengthen the network.
I still don’t understand crypto, but Throne appears to have worked fine. I look forward to an option with reoccurring automatic payments.
I’m trying auto recurrent donations but no luck yet :/ Still researching.
I donated a couple euros now.
Appreciated 🙏
Just a headsup if you’re trying to get on Open Collective, it looks like that might be another patreon scenario:
Thank you so much for hosting this instance. I appreciate it and will help with a small contribution of a few dollars per month from now own. ❤️
Thank you! Every dollar is important and you can be sure that we will use every single dollar for this instance.
Sent some coins, thank you!
I would gladly send Monero [XMR] if you had the option.
Hmm. Let me check MetaMask for it.
Nope, MetaMask only supports Ethereum or derivates. I’ve used MyMonero for it.
Check the post again, they added a monero option
Maybe I’ve already did? I have plausible deniability ;) The Monero blockchain is not transparent.
But for the sake of transparency, if the admins want to, they can post a monthly summary of XMR donations.
I set up a Patreon subscription. I am a DevOps Engineer. If you ever need to move to a more distributed setup let me know.
Thank you for your support! But to keep costs low, we had to keep for one server for now. But you’re in my mind if needed :)
I don’t know if you already run on docker, but you could run on docker in order to simulate a distributed setup and be able to move the various pieces in and out as needed, also portainer and traefik are very nice for this, if you create a common network for all containers with a bit of docker compose magic you have a plug and play kind of setup
Got a Zcash address?
Unfortunately, no. Currently there is only ETH, XMR and Trocador with about 70 currencies that will send the money to my unified single wallet.
This is because I added multiple cryptocurrencies before and it was a big mess. The money was split into smaller pieces across multiple currencies and wallets. As you can imagine, this is very difficult to manage.
BTW it looks like Trocador support Zcash.
May I ask where the server is hosted?
Currently Ukraine. May change in the future.
Oh nice. And what platform do you use?
I can’t say that for a while. I don’t want to doxx myself.
I don’t know how saying what platform is used to host the server will affect its security that much.
For example, the fact you are using cloudflare is public and doesn’t really harm you.
Yeah it doesn’t but its a shield in front of host itself. We’re not doing anything illegal here but still.
I mean, it would be trivial to find for anyone who cares to run a ping and do a Google search for the IP it resolves. You’re definitely not shielding yourself from any government agencies by keeping it secret.
The reason they won’t reveal is because Pornography is flat out banned in Ukraine, if we revealed this someone might report us and get the host taken away again, similar to what happened when the server used Hetzner.
Probably a really stupid and ignorant question, but how are you hosting in Ukraine when they are at war?
They need money now more than before. Why would they stop exporting stuff?
People still live, work and study over there. The country is big and the front is away from many people lives.
What would be good options for me if I just want to use my credit card to quickly buy whatever crypto and send it to any address I want? I did look at some sites a couple of days ago, but they were more for trading and didn’t seem too great for this use case.
I never got into crypto even though I’m a huge nerd, so I have no idea which service is trustworthy and quick’n’easy to use.
I registered to throne.com, which allows direct anonymous credit card donations. If they accept us, then you can use it if you want.
Just don’t jump into a topic you don’t know if you don’t want to learn buddy. I’ll fix this.
And to be honest, I’m not a crypto expert either. I just know basics and some technical details that I’m using on IRL work.
Ah let’s see where that throne.com deal goes then, that’d be neat.
But I honestly don’t mind the learnin’, I was more just soliciting for good tips for this specific use case since I figured somebody’s bound to be more clued in already 😁
I know surprising amounts about the technical side of many cryptocurrency projects because in another life I’ve worked on distributed systems and encryption-adjacent things, but like the idiot I am I never bought all that many of anything and haven’t “handled” them in ages.
If you really want, I can recommend MetaMask. Which is an easy, well known, trusted and local-only app. I’m using it to manage current crypto donations.
There’s also “Trust” app that supports multiple currencies but it is more complicated to me than MetaMask.
Both of these apps allows in-app crypto buy/sell.
You should’ve probably heard about Binance, Coinbase etc. that are centralized exchanges. But I don’t trust them and I think they’re against morale of crypto.
Oh Metamask does in-app onramps and offramps nowadays? Well that’s pretty handy, it was still a pretty dumb no-frills “wallet” when I last used it but it’s been a good while. I’ll give it a poke! Thank you
Used throne.com - hope it works :)
