September 2025: Updates for the .worlds and call for donations
It's been a long while since I wrote a blog post. Some things have happened, which I will write about, and also we need to talk about finances.
PieFed.World
First of all, we've expanded the .world with a new instance: PieFed.World.
PieFed is part of the 'threadiverse', it's a link aggregator like Lemmy and Mbin. Our teammember MrKaplan has set this instance up, carefully tuning it and fixing bugs along the way. In July, registrations were opened. So, for those that want to try an alternative to Lemmy, or if you don't have a threadiverse account yet, register and try it yourself!
toot.community
In May 2024, we took over administration of toot.community from @jorijn@toot.community who no longer had the time to look after it. In May 2025, I was contacted by him again, asking if he could have it back. So, we handed the instance back and it's no longer part of FHF.
Friendica.World
Our Friendica instance Friendica.World keeps us busy...
It's still the largest Friendica instance, but it has many performance issues. These need to be addressed, but mainly by the devs of the software, who need to change database queries in the code. And then we need to wait for that new code to be released so we can test it.
Currently there's a new release coming, which might fix some issues, but it has a problem which needs to be fixed before we can install it.
Meanwhile, if you use Friendica.World, best is not to go to the network page, but visit a page like community. The network page has the most performance issues.
We will keep troubleshooting this.
Finances
Our last blog post was back in January, so let's see where the finances went from there.
We had managed to get the expenses down to around 1950 EUR/mo, and after handing back toot.community we now spend around 1700 EUR/mo. To give you an idea what we spend it on, this is where we spent it on in August:
| What | Cost EUR | Remark |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | 1090 | Servers etc |
| Wasabi | 275 | Media storage |
| Donations | 103 | Donations to Mastodon, lemmy |
| Domain names | 60 | |
| Foundation | 50 | Monthly contribution to the FHF |
| DO/AWS | 50 | Various small resources |
| Mailgun | 31 | Mail sending service |
| Cloudflare | 30 | Only for Lemmy.world |
| Borgbase | 18 | For backups |
The donations on the various platforms have gone down from 2000 in January to around 1300 EUR/mo the last 3 months. As you can see, this is not enough for the running costs. Also, we had some unexpected extra costs (over 1000,–) when we had to pay taxes for the foundation (strange, for a non-profit..). I'll see if we can get an accountant to check this, but also accountants are costly..
So with all this, we're burning through the reserves quite quickly. That's why we will start calling for donations on all the instances monthly.
As a reminder, you can donate to FHF here: – KoFi – Preferred – Liberapay – OpenCollective – Patreon
Volunteers
As the number of active users has gone down over the last year(s), also the number of people helping us out with various tasks has gone down. If you would like to help out the FHF, or any instance in particular, please let us know!
We are looking for:
– Moderators (for one or more instances) for handling reports coming in
– Technical / infra people , for helping run all the instances and plan for the future. (We use linux/docker/terraform/ansible, so either you need to know about them, or want to learn about them).
If you're interested, contact via mail: info@fedihosting.foundation or via Mastodon: @fedihosting_foundation@mastodon.world.