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
I wanna give /u/otter a big 🙌 for all the work he’s done here. All the fedecan site and content was him, as well as dealing with the more mundane paperwork to sort this all out.
😊
It was totally a group effort! Thankfully, I had some extra time the past few months to dedicate to this, and I learned a lot throughout the process. Really excited to get started on the next portion of the project!
Very cool! Thank you for taking the initiative on this!
Holy moly, this is great for ensuring both the continuity of your instance and the infrastructure necessary for federated social media! Really good plans all around.
FOCC ya! If anyone can, Fedecan!
Great news. I use this site far more than I used Netflix before I cancelled that service so I consider a monthly donation money well spent.
This is it right here.
Happy to see you’re accepting donations again!
Congratulations !
Thank you! I’m hoping to shift some of my focus now towards getting those guide pages up, in particular the ones on moderation and community building. I heard we already have a PR so hopefully it’s easy enough for everyone to weigh in / contribute :)
Exciting stuff! Here’s to healthier social media!
FYI, the “Support Lemmy” link in the menu on lemmy.ca site is going to the general Lemmy donation page at join-lemmy.org
That’s actually hard coded inside lemmy-ui: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui/blob/5cd66bb037aca82bef396d48dd9e4ec6f21ef747/src/shared/config.ts#L7-L8
Ah, good to know.
Sponsored monthly! Way to go everyone, this is awesome. Contributing feels like something good I can do in the face of a whole lot of bad in the world rn, and I’m grateful this instance exists and is so well supported. 🫡 🙏
The website looks great!
You mentioned the costs for server hosting, domain registration and non-profit requirements, which is great so we have an idea of how much needs to be covered with donations going forward.
You also mentioned reimbursing people for past costs. What’s the current debt?
Thanks for doing all of this.
Since we took over in June 2023, truckbc has been paying personally for the server. All costs including the non profit registration (covered by me) have added up to about $2500 so far.
I don’t have the number handy but going off memory, Smorks has about $1000 in donations from before he was going to transfer our way.
Ideally I’d just like to keep our finances totally public, but we’re not that organized yet.
Ideally I’d just like to keep our finances totally public, but we’re not that organized yet.
That’s not something I know anything about, so I’ll let you guys sort out what to do there (along with everything else) :)
But given what you’ve been open about so far:
~$1500 in debt ~$155/month ongoing costs (amortizing the domain reg over the year)
Thanks, I’ll come up with a good donation amount based on these numbers :)
Just the other day, I was thinking about how nice it would be for the team behind lemmy.ca to expand into other Fediverse services. I’m glad to see it’s on the roadmap. The future is looking brighter for non-corporate social media in Canada.
We’re excited too :)
I was thinking about how nice it would be for the team behind lemmy.ca to expand into other Fediverse services
Did you have any particular service that you might us to focus on?
Not the person you replied to, but what about Mastodon?
We haven’t made any final decisions yet, but right now I think a lot of us already use https://mstdn.ca alongside Lemmy.
It might be a duplicated effort to spin up another mastodon, whereas we could focus our attention on new platforms + support the existing Canadian mastodon instance in other ways
Did you have any particular service that you might us to focus on?
Also not the persons you replied to but I am very interested in !neodb@lemmy.zip (so much so, I started the community) which is a kind of Goodreads, IMDb, etc, etc replacement - basically all those sites that used to be great and have been bought out by big companies (mainly Amazon in the two named cases).
How was the process for registering a non-profit?
Tbh not too bad, just some dredging through paperwork and having to write up the bylaws, etc. Vancity was pretty helpful in getting the banking setup.
Wow, another reason to switch to Vancity.
I wish I could donate now, but I broke my foot and I’m off work because of it so I don’t have any income. Thank you for all your hard work to provide this service to Canadians and other people from around the world!
Don’t feel bad, take care of yourself first!
Give only if you can. If enough of us who can give do give, we should be able cover the current costs and provide some buffer.
From each according to their ability, etc
No worries at all, hope you have a speedy recovery! The idea is that people can contribute what they can, when they can, and that should be enough to keep the service free and accessible to everyone :)
