Hi, all! I'm Eerongal, the admin who set up the TTRPG Network.
After merely a month after working out the details around this lemmy instance with a number of other reddit TTRPG mods, the growth of this instance has been quite explosive! This is a good thing, it's always good for a community to grow.
However
Growth is not without its costs. For transparency, the current projected costs of running this instance is about $25, around $12-ish dollars for the hosting, and another $13-ish for mail hosting, plus about $6 every year for domain registration. this is ok. I signed up for this knowing the cost, and being perfectly ok with fronting the bill for now.
This seems like it's definitely going to be a more long term thing.
Originally when setting this up, I had no idea if this would just be a temporary refuge during reddit blackout, or if this would be something more. As it stands, we've had a ton of growth in just this short amount of time. As stated above, this is great! Far more than I expected.
Another However
I got a notification just earlier today from the host that we're using a large percentage of our memory (not a huge deal at the moment, it was just a heads up, and our memory footprint is relatively low, this is just due to high user traffic over the past 24-48 hours), and after some checking, we're also nearing almost 50% of our file storage! Admittedly, this is merely a paltry 200 GB, and includes everything to run the server. Scaling this up with the host is fairly minimal (about $1 for every 200gb).
The host also let me know that over the past 24 hours, our instance serviced over 5 million requests. This is likely because of combined user traffic and certain posts (not naming names) trending in the wider fediverse.
What this means, and why I'm posting this
I'm posting this, because in an effort to better prepare ourselves for the future, I'm setting up the ability for people to provide donations through ko-fi.
As stated above, our costs are currently fully under control, and there's no real issues right now.
I'm merely setting this up so that this instance can position itself in a positive spot as we continue to grow.
Does this mean I have to pay to use TTRPG.network?
Absolutely not. Donations are, and for the foreseeable future will be, optional. I merely want to rip the bandage of not accepting them off right now so that we can make sure this community is around for a long time.
What will you do with the funds?
Use them to pay for the server. Any excess funds will sit around to accumulate in a "war chest" for future needs. I'm certainly more than willing to do whatever is needed to appease the community as far as transparency goes, if there's ever problems or concerns around the site's funding.
What (besides paying) can I do to help?
First thing would be to be mindful of resources. If you can use an image hosting service, such as imgur, or whatever you prefer, will help cut down on the growth of these resources. That said, i currently have no plans to disable the ability to upload images in any way.
Spreading the word and helping the instance grow will also help out in a positive way. In addition, participating in the community by posting, voting, commenting, etc. helps to grow the community in its own way too.
Overall, I'm very proud and happy that we are at this point where I even have to consider these things. Because the alternative would be that the server never caught on, and went unused and eventually closed.
overall, I'm just happy I can provide something akin to the community we had back over on reddit. I know I personally have been avoiding reddit as much as possible since the debacle.
All in all, I want this to be an open dialog, that's why I'm putting this out to the community. If you have questions, feel free to ask. If you have concerns, also feel free to voice them. If you want to complain, well, i guess go ahead, though that doesn't feel too productive.
As for donations, you can donate, either one time or monthly right here
And i will also be adding this link to the sidebar of the main page.
Thank you for hearing me out, hope this doesn't rustle anyone's jimmies, and may all your rolls be 20's!
In the event that storage ever does become an issue, has there been discussion about deleting old posts with large file sizes but limited community engagement?
For what its worth, the current space is mostly (about 50%) being taken up by backups (currently keeping a running 7 days of backups), that i'll probably look into taking the backup files local and reduce the number of backups performed, so that will help a lot. Besides, having a remote backup is also not a bad idea.
That said, at the host's quoted $5/tb of storage space, I don't anticipate the storage becoming a problem any time soon, I more wanted to call it out because the recent growth has been unexpected, in a good way.
As for deleting/purging things, i'd want to take a long, hard look at other options before just wiping out previous content. That feels like a last resort to me.
All in all, nothing about this post is intended to scare people, or raise any red flags, and in fact, i hope does quite the opposite! I wanted to call out how the growth has completely outpaced my expectations in such a short amount of time. When originally setting this up, i figured 200GB of storage would probably last us for a long time and was more than generous to start out.