Currently, we have $6,500.91 in our hopper.
It just seems weird having all of those, mostly, unused funds sitting there doing nothing.
I just wanted to start the conversation about the possibility of paying-it-forward in some capacity. For example, a certain percentage of monthly contributions could go to a charity.
What are your thoughts?
Personally I think a little fiscal conservation would be wise at this point.
Costs can, and do eventually, rise. Hardware fails, and other things can happen as a surprise; and I’d rather that Beehaw not be insolvent when those things happen.
While I get the wish to do fun things to enhance the community; I think we need to be keeping an eye on things too. A few bad months where users are squeezed and unable to contribute could also severely impact Beehaw; particularly in and around monthly costs. At no point should Beehaw admins be paying out-of-pocket for things if Beehaw itself as an organization has the funds to properly pay things.
If we do genuinely have too much funding in excess; examining how we could expand Beehaw or make it better is another way you can responsibly re-invest the funds into making Beehaw better.
Additional servers/services might be neat; things like:
Of course such things could also require additional staff on hand, so I understand that you might want to entice someone to help manage these extra things first.
Beehaw has enough to run without any additional donations for the next two years at the current costs so the finances of that seems well enough.
That said, I don’t feel comfortable spending money donated to Beehaw for things non-Beehaw related.
As for expanding in other services… Well, we already have enough trouble with Lemmy, I would not want to add more moderation hurdles personally.
Mastodon, for example, would have far better moderation tools than lemmy. As for your concerns with “Adding more moderation hurdles”, genuinely I feel recruiting more mods before and while you spin up a service is fine. That may mean you take time to pick them out and train them right. That’s fine. But I don’t think moderation challenges are insurmountable.