Can confirm. The bottlenecks that happen when the site gets high traffic are in the database. New websocket messages happen in response to post and comment creation, which are relatively lightweight operations with a small payload.

So live updates have consistently been an issue that needs to be resolved on the frontend, but making that fix would not stop the site from getting overloaded

If I’m reading it right, we’re sitting at the point where we’re comfortably meeting costs, but don’t bring in enough for anything else substantial, and are banking any excess we do have.

That is correct

How would the core community and current donors demonstrate that kind of support? Are we talking a post in /c/main /c/chapotraphouse saying ‘upvote if you think we should get more money and hire a full time dev’?

Yeah, that would work. It’s not something we’ve specifically fleshed out. We just don’t want it to seem astroturfed and there hasn’t been much concern about it until now. Maybe some help coming up with more stretch goals would be helpful, too

We’ve been linking to an old comment from an ex-admin for a while, so I wanna get a fresh statement out there.

Are we flush with cash? Barely covering goings? Covering outgoings with some dev coffee money to spare?

Infrastructure is safely covered for the foreseeable future, so long as we don’t have a mass exodus of patrons, and even then we would last a while. That includes things like matrix and gitea.

We are definitely in a middle ground where we’re not even close to afford paying a full time developer, but we make plenty to cover keeping the site live. We’ve offered some of this extra money to devs in the past and that’s been universally refused. For the amount of money we have, I definitely wouldn’t be rushing to break opsec for it.

We’ve talked about doing regular donor campaigns on the site to bump up our income into the range of a junior developer’s salary. There was a comrade offering to do it for a generously low amount. But even that would be a significant campaign and we wouldn’t want to undertake it without the support of our core community and current donors.

In the meantime, whatever money is left over sits untouched. That will continue to grow and sit in this middle ground until we either decrease significantly in patronage, save up enough to fund some developer time (this would take years at the current rate), or have some sort of legal troubles. We hope anyone who’s been around long enough to be invested in this question will also understand why we’re not disclosing any more particulars on how that’s handled. If that’s not the case for anyone, I’m more than happy to answer questions.

My car’s sitting in my garage because I can’t afford gas but yeah I guess a bike would be more authoritarian

Active organization at 57% and rising :rosa-salute:

Congrats on the new job! And thank you. Yeah, it’s actively managed. There are some fresh initiatives requiring some new dev tooling, so it will go to good use. If you want to read more, this is as close to an official line as we have on donation money:

https://hexbear.net/post/128920/comment/1488026

Edit: to be clear, this user didn’t write this comment as an official line and wasn’t involved with the site at the time. It’s just a good encapsulation of everything

Best of luck with the job hunt, comrade o7

It’d be cool to have you pitching in again

Heightened emotional states make it harder to disengage. A lot of people take it real personally, sometimes for valid reasons, sometimes for fragility reasons. Hard to say, but it’s the behavior that matters either way

That is accurate. Although feel free to skip over mod chat and just DM me

Featured. Congrats, comrade :rosa-salute: