I'm seeing an ALARMING number of people talking about giving cohost money they don't have. Folks, if you are struggling to pay rent, struggling to pay for stuff for your family, if you're anything but financially secure, please do not give this website $5. For the love of god don't skip a single lunch to give this website $5. Take care of yourselves.
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in reply to @lori's post:
...don't the devs make $80k a year or something?
Wild for them to be so anti volunteer labor, this is so much worse than allowing people to like. Put passion project hours in
$94k, it was $87k but they gave themselves a raise at some point.
Volunteer labor won't fix this though, they'd still be in the negative tens of thousands a month. You'd have to cut salary or cut employees, and cutting employees isn't exactly easy when all the employees are also owners of the company.
Yeah, I'm feeling like I'm living through a groundhog day back when our non-profit society was considering shutting down the phpBB forum back in mid-2000s we had because the classifieds, sponsored ads from local businesses (not from Google) and expos couldn't cover the costs of the website before the non-profit society just gave up and moved everything over to Facebook pages/Facebook groups.
I paid for so many tables at the biannual expos out of my own pocket, and the non-profit society still couldn't justify the expenses of keeping the forum open.
And I'm going to guess your phpBB forum did not cost as much as cohost to run either!
This stuff has never been profitable. At best if you aren't paying full time salaries you can keep a small community afloat with donations. But there's a reason most forums were paid for out of pocket from someone with enough money who just really wanted to run them back in the day.
Yeah, that's why I don't understand Cohost's for-profit model at all, even as a workers' cooperative, because we really tried to hosting phpBB viable as a non-profit org through everything imaginable: merch, yearly memberships, expos (and selling tables to vendors), sponsorships, banner ads, charging people for classified posts etc.
And the org has been a registered non-profit since the 1980s as well.
chipping in $5 to cover webhosting costs and the like for something i use is something i'm happy to do when i'm able. this uh. very clearly is not like that at all
i made a post about this and how bad it is for people on the breadline to donate to a hobby business ran by people who insist on taking home £75k/year.
almost all the commenters rolled up to insist that £75K/year is barely enough to live on, never mind fair compensation for going "sorry haven't made a business model yet, felt bad so took a self care six months"