I don’t know enough about the specifics to say whether or not it’s something that would be useful upstream. It’s possible that it’s just their unique combination of software & hardware that makes it work the way it does.

I’m sure someone in their Matrix server could offer more insight.

I initially went with Kbin and Beehaw since it was clear that kbin and lemmy were going to mostly diverge on key features from the start. At the time, Beehaw was getting a ton of traffic thanks to the join-lemmy homepage placing them at the top of the suggested instances list, so there was no real criteria that went into my choice other than that.

Eventually deleted my Beehaw account though, after the admins made it clear they were not prepared for the influx and were being rather dramatic about their defederation choices as a result. It left a bad taste in my mouth, and while I understand their stance was “safe place first, popular site second” it just didn’t vibe with what I expected from an open reddit alternative.

Moved to VLemmy after that, and we all know how that went, but my rationale was that it was a growing but moderately small instance.

Afterwards I made 2 new accounts: one on infosec.pub and the other on lemdro.id.

At this point I’m mostly sticking with the Lemdro.id account, since they seem to be offering some very friendly support via their matrix space, and they have some apparently unique changes to backend to make it a very fast and easy to scale instance.

My kbin.social and infosec.pub accounts are mostly just alts gathering dust as a result.

Thank you, the word “non-profit” was completely eluding my brain while writing that.

Yeah I hope a lot of the larger or more serious instances will look into that going forward, very curious to see what the landscape of all this looks like in a few months.

I think without some kind of “incorporation” (or whatever the tech/FOSS equivalent of that is), most of these kinds of thing will be vulnerable to issues with the owner’s payment methods failing. Even with donation options available it’s almost always still being used to pay to the server owner in parallel to them paying server / domain costs out of pocket (and then reimbursing themselves with the donations)

That said, I have to assume there’s some way to set up some kind of automated payment option where community donations actually fill a fund that is used to pay costs directly in case the maintainer drops off the face of the earth.