This came up in the group so I thought I’d document it publicly:
Right now, I am paying for the costs of the forum. This includes a couple of things (everything in $USD, although I myself am in Canada).
A server at Digital Ocean. Right now it’s a $10/month server, with $5 of backup. It seems to be using about 15-20% of the CPU power, and all other resources (disk space, bandwidth) are relatively small.
Email sending services through Mailgun. I had to bump that up right away to a $35/month plan. We’ll know at the end of the month if we need to go up one more tier.
Jeremy is paying for the TiddlyWikiDotOrg domain name on an annual basis, which is used for a few other things and that’s usually about $10 annually, so consider that a negligible or included cost.
This is pretty reasonable for software / hosting costs. The big cost – think $50-$100USD per hour – would be technical people. I’ve set up several Discourse instances that I run, not because I’m an expert, but because the software (relatively speaking) is well optimized to install with some basic server skills.
And lastly but absolutely not least is management of the content. @pmario volunteered to make some SVG logos so he got handed admin/moderator status, and we asked @EricShulman to hold a set of keys once again.
The “trust level” system will gradually give heavy users permissions to edit tags and other settings over time as they use the system. It looks like we can setup per-category moderators – not just for plugins, but anything that might need a little clean up now and again, or new features like “cool TW of the week” or whatever the community decides.
Discourse is open source software, but there is a company behind it and they offer hosting. It starts at around $100USD / month, which will be close to what the total here is for the self hosted version. Less customization options and it may actually jump to that $300 monthly tier. If we can continue to have some volunteer server admin time (I’m looking for someone to specifically join the server admin team, please message me or comment!), then we can jointly maintain this at a lower cost and higher options for customizing to the needs of the community.
I think after month 1, we can have a look at usage and costs and see where things are at.
So, who pays over time? @clutterstack said it well:
I think everyone realizes by now that free isn’t really free, GG or otherwise.
Open Collective is part of the puzzle, I think. If 20 people pay $5 per month – costs are covered!*
*
*I set the goal at $150USD/month in the new Open Collective Infrastructure option, to give us a little buffer
It’s also in a state of transition from a Fission experiment to a community experiment. There’s a new TiddlyWiki Community Infrastructure option to clearly distinguish it from the previous Fission items. Don’t worry, especially those of you that recently starting contributing, the Fission bucket will also end up with community.
Again, with Open Collective – volunteers wanted! We need people to take ownership and make suggestions of what we might do. I haven’t had time to research what deleting donation tiers with existing people in it does, to turn off those Fission items.
Let’s keep discussing here in the forum, and let’s also do one or more community calls (across a couple of dates/timezones) in the coming month, to discuss and organize.
I’ll look into it.