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
Congratulations! I will put in a little donation this weekend.
Apologies if this sounds impatient, but is there any kind of update on the status of Fedecan? This was announced six months ago and there’s been radio silence since then.
Not at all, that’s fair to ask!
Right now the focus is on moving to our new hardware, with some more details in the body of this post.
https://lemmy.ca/post/36540245
Once that’s done we will be able to spin up additional services much more easily, and it will also change our estimated financial situation (donations vs. costs etc.)
We’ve also been busy the past few months with other things (especially me) and so I haven’t been able to post updates as often as I would have wanted to. Thankfully I’ve got a lot more time in the new year so that should be different moving forward :)
Was there a certain aspect you wanted to hear back on? I can write up more details on that in the meantime
Thanks for the reply. I am particularly interested in Fedecan’s expansion into other decentralized/federated platforms. I know the timing is dependent on the server migration, but I was wondering if there’s a tentative list of what may be supported.
Pixelfed is most likely to be the next one, and we haven’t ruled out anything yet. It depends on what’s popular and what there is a need for (ex. someone else isn’t already hosting)
We’ve researched and/or done some prep for Bookwyrm, Loop, Friendica, Sublinks, and Mobilizon. The exact list is uncertain, but the migration will give us lots of room to grow. I’m thinking once we announce one, we can ask what people want next.
Very cool! Thank you for taking the initiative on this!
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 :)
Happy to see you’re accepting donations again!
Exciting stuff! Here’s to healthier social media!
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.
The website looks great!
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.
Subscribed monthly.
I didn’t expect Github Sponsors to have no fees attached. I’ll probably just do an etransfer though.
Happy cake day! 🎂
Ooh, it’s my Fuck Spez anniversary? Nice!
Not “Fedican”? Because I’ve never seen it called the “Fedeverse”.
Think Federated Canada, not Fediverse Canada.
It also felt more French / bilingual friendly.
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!
This is great! I’ve been wanting to provide support. Now I’m signed up for monthly.
This is great, but I’d also like to have an idea of what is needed to support this on an individual level. I know that isn’t easy since this is just starting up, but we should have an idea of what’s needed individually once things have been running for a while. Suggested donations would make it easier to know what’s appropriate to keep this afloat.
In the meantime, I’ll do a one-time donation partially to help build a cash reserve (and to support the year of good service I’ve already received).
Thanks again for all your hard work, both in running the server and in getting thos NFP set up.
Agreed, but like you said it’s hard to know right now. We only need around 30 people at $5/mo to cover costs, but will 30 people donate? 🤷
We’ll post a funding update in a month or so once things settle in a bit.
If you’re tight on cash, don’t give it to us.
I mostly posted that to raise visibility. I understand it’s a hard question to answer right now. $5/mo was kind of what I was thinking, but I don’t even know how many accounts/users are on here, so I can’t say if that’s realistic. I’ve already given more than I ever did to Reddit and consider it money well spent.
Ultimately if we end up “over funded” then once we’ve got some savings built up, I’d like to re-donate that to the projects we use (like lemmy)
If it helps provide resources to get other services like the ones that were suggested, that would also be great. But knowing we’re helping the developers would also be a win by me, even if I don’t agree with their politics.
That’s basically how I feel as well. We’ll put it to the community before we do anything though.
