Before lemmy there was mastadon. An Indian student maintained an instance called inditoot from his pocket, first on mastadon and then on pleroma. For years. The instance was supposed to be donation run student project, and it went on for a few years before being shut down for good.
It’s owner revealed to me that he got exactly zero donations - from both India and abroad combined.
I have a similar tale about an NGO, which is actually doing good work on ground in India and Bangladesh, aspiring to become truly global. The owner was without any salary or donations for nearly two years before a famous politician intervened and he started getting steady donations. While raising funds for a natural disaster in Bangladesh, the owner told me that he/his NGO was no longer accepting foodgrain and water bottles in donation - he needed money to transport the stuff he already had and hardly anyone was donating money.
Indians are charitable without understanding how charity works. Their cash donations are only for their religious causes. And foreigne aid comes to India only for their (foreign) causes - which includes money for conversion of Indians.
Sure, a dedicated lemmy instance would be good to have. But who’d pay the bills, and from which money?
This is one major problem… That we have to depend on money…
Of course we do. Money exists for a reason. And if you have money to donate, instead of wasting it on immature causes, better donate it to maintainers of lemmy. Apparently they also need it
Money has been artificially created to make us believe that we cannot do without it.
If you are implying that you do not need money to start a lemmy instance dedicated to India/Asia, please go ahead and make one. I’ll join.
I think he is saying that money is just an abstract concept created party by necessity and partly out of greed. And if human society as a whole made a conscious effort, we can eliminate the need for money.
I can read what he is saying. It isn’t complicated.
But utopian gynastics of his mind have no place in discussions about real world action, which is what this post purported with.
I do not know why you are getting downvoted, it is a great idea. But it is very hard. To run an instance 3 things are crucial, 1. Time, 2. Money and, 3. Expertise. You need money to buy/rent servers, expertise to run a server and time to manage an instance, like moderating, defederating with other harmful instances, communicating with admins from other instances etc. There are a few south area specific mastodon instances, there was one pixelfed instance, but never a lemmy/mbin/piefed instance, at least not any I know of.
Lets make 1. Do I make it, or would you like the honors
I don’t have the know-how.
I sadly don’t have the moneys for it. We essentially just need a vps (soemone else’s computer, for which we pay them for (for a lemmy instance, we need a very simple small machine, but lots of storage, around a tb or so. What many instances do is instead of purchasing a server with large storage, they buy a small server, and buy storage somewhere else seperately (something like amazon s3)) this would be in ball park of (5 + 25)*12 = 360 USD per year and domain name (which as per your request must have some asiatic feel, so some asian country tld (top level domain)) 10-20 usd. beyond that, procedure is somewhat simple, and well documented.
Honestly when you posted, I initially missed the “instance” part and thought you meant community, hence i jumped into saying that lets make 1 ( i thought you were looking for interest for a community) but when i read your reply, i re read the title, and hit the wall. Sorry in case i killed your excitement.
Can’t servers be created ?
Yeah, in your own always on computer that has proper power backup so it never goes down, even in blackout war times, and that maintains internet connectivity without losing it for a second. Or you get a virtual server in a hosted place like Hetzner or something.
Edit - does the country/region where an instance is hosted really matter?
