Dear nettimers,
Over the last 25-plus years, nettime never sought or accepted any
funding. It has always been run on the generosity of all people
involved, donating server resources and time. And I think this has been
one of the reasons why the list survived so long.
Still, over at the nettime Mastodon instance (TLDR.nettime.org), we
decided to start a fundraising drive to collectivize some basic
infrastructure costs (servers) and donate to people who provide us with
some infrastructure for free (software and list hosting).
https://donorbox.org/community-funding-of-tldr-nettime-org
There is an direct and indirect reason for that, each alone is a bit
weak, but together they make sense for us.
The first thing is that doing anything online has become more resource
intensive and the underlying infrastructure has professionalized in
response to that. The mastodon instance has a much larger footprint than
the mailing list, and that costs a little, but also running an email
server has becoming more difficult. Servus has donated the technical
infrastructure to nettime-l and the costs for the server of TLDR are not
a super-pressing short-tem issue, but might become one in the medium term.
That's one weak reason to ask for donations. The other reasons is that
nettime, both the list and TLDR, is, overall, a relatively privileged
community that is relying on free infrastructure, often produced under
precarious conditions. This kind of implies to give something back.
Hence we want to donate some of the money back to the person who
maintains the mastodon fork and sto ervus.at for hosting.
Again, we don't have to do that, but it seems like the right thing to do
and these are the two reasons for setting up a donations page.
Below is the announcement we put out a few days over TLDR. At the URL
There you also find the breakdow of the costs (where you will notice,
most of the money will go towards TLDR).
All the best.
Felix
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We are asking for your money. Really. It's that time of the year.
TLDR is an effort run entirely off collective, voluntary, free labor.
All our posting, all our reading and all our infrastructuring.
We've been doing this for about one year now, and it has come along
nicely. TLDR, by way of the work of about 400 people, has developed into
one of the more humane, interesting and all out pleasurable nodes of the
internet.
But, of course, free labor only gets you that far, even when ignoring
for the moment the question of who can afford to do free labor in the
first place.
TLDR relies on a physical infrastructure, and as such, it costs money.
Not terribly much, but still. And we want to collectivize the financial
responsibility for this infrastructure.
The bare minimum of what we expect to require to pay all the bills for
2024 is €750.00.
But we want to go beyond that, and also donate some money to two
projects we rely on heavily. One is Hometown, the Mastodon fork we are
using, and the other is servus.at, the artist-run collective that hosts
the nettime mailing list.
Why? Because we think we can and should. So, if you can contribute,
please do so.
https://donorbox.org/community-funding-of-tldr-nettime-org
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