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Otter @lemmy.ca

Exciting News: Lemmy.ca is now managed by our new registered not-for-profit organization 'Fedecan' (+ resuming donations & gathering feedback)

fedecan.ca Welcome | Fedecan

Discover a new way to connect online. As a Canadian not-for-profit, we can help you join a growing network of federated social media that prioritizes community over profit.

Welcome | Fedecan

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.

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

Fediverse @lemmy.world
Otter @lemmy.ca

Exciting News: Lemmy.ca is now managed by our new registered not-for-profit organization 'Fedecan' (+ resuming donations & gathering feedback)

Exciting News: Lemmy.ca is now managed by our new registered not-for-profit organization 'Fedecan' (+ resuming donations & gathering feedback)
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72 comments

  • 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!

  • 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.

  • 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 :)

  • 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 :)

  • This is great! I've been wanting to provide support. Now I'm signed up for monthly.

  • I don't know if I'm missing it somewhere, but many banks now let folks set up recurring interac e-transfers. Just set a monthly $5 with my bank.

    • Thank you, we'll see about including that information on the donation page.

      Maybe we can link to the guides for some common banks so that people know what the process will be like for them

  • Just wanted to say thanks to everyone involved in formalizing this. Really helps to know that lemmy.ca will be support and stable for a while to come. I really also love the census you did. Would love to see that continue. I've signed up to support monthly through GitHub.

    I'm going to brain-dump some suggestions that come to mind for the future:

    • I really like how OpenCollective.com makes it easy to see the incoming and outgoing transactions for a fund. You've setup up a bunch of payment options already, so I don't want to add to that burden, but it would be cool to see a similar kind of reporting for Fedecan -- it doesn't have to be super sophisticated, heck even a CSV transaction log would do. It would be useful for transparency, but also so that the community can ensure Fedecan's expenses are comfortably paid for.
    • My dream is that the Fediverse provides viable alternatives to big tech's social platforms, and the first thing that comes to mind is how Facebook and its various services are the default for so many people. Facebook' Social Graph, Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups, Facebook Marketplace and Instagram come to mind. If Fedecan can work towards providing a stable alternative to even one of those, it would be an effort worth supporting.
    • Currently the only other Fediverse services I use are Mastodon through social.coop, and BookWyrm through Bookrastinaing. I'd love to see Fedecan build or support essential services like that.
    • This is leaving the Fediverse scope, but I recently learned about an initiative from India where they're tackling monopolies like Uber by building services that don't take commission. NammaYatri.in is one example. They use the Beckn protocol and India's ONDC stack. In the very long term, I wonder if Fedecan could support those kinds of initiatives, to setup alternatives with healthier incentives baked in.

  • Have my little 5$ donation on github sponsors. It was just a one timer, but i will see if i can do more next time :) and just a question can someone contribute to the guides and learning resources? Because i would like to contribute there if i can.

    • Totally! We set up the website with collaboration in mind so that anyone can help write the guides + iteratively improve upon them. This should ease the workload and allow everyone to weigh in on the best way to present the information. The website supports internationalization, so we can have the guides in different languages too.

      I'll make another post here later to get feedback on the planned structure / contribution process. I can tag you in that post if you would like :)

      • Yes would definitly like to contribute and even help translate it to german if its wanted. And you probably noticed it already but i made already a pr about a guide

  • Not "Fedican"? Because I've never seen it called the "Fedeverse".

    • Think Federated Canada, not Fediverse Canada.

      It also felt more French / bilingual friendly.

72 comments