How much are uploaded images stressing the hardware? I try to host off site but I've uploaded a screenshot or thing directly for convenience. If I threw you a dollar or a month or something when that becomes available would that cover my usage?
I’m actually quite amazed by how little would be needed to keep this instance fully funded and even provide other services at the same time. If just 1/4 of the users gave 25cents per month we would have enough money to cover the hosting, new hardware and some paid development/administrative work! The problem however still resides with not having a fiscal host to be the entity needed to accept donations.
It actually doesnt work that way. All images are attempted to be stored locally by the program lemmy uses (pict.rs) so this makes storage grow very fast. Solution is to offload them to object storage as TheDude has done. This means a dollar or two a month from some users will be able to cover costs as things grow assuming as the site gets bigger some % of people give a few dollars here and there.