Thanks for all the questions. It has really gotten me to thinking about how to navigate the future of the project.
I have a question for all of you. My approach is that we are all understand that there is no such thing as a free service, and that for something like this to be long term sustainable donations (or some source of revenue) is crucial. If people get value from the service then it only makes sense to give back to the service to sustain it.
With this in mind, I'm toying with an idea that I would like to get a temperature check from HN on.
How would you react if, when donations are too low, Haasie serves a single image that requests donations to sustain the service in place of the original anonymously uploaded content, until the required donation level is reached? Once there are enough donations normal service is resumed.
Hi, your site came up in my research. Although it wasn't clear if it was an actual service or an art project? Keen to hear more about your experiences.
Fair question. I did read the TOCs, and studied the current TOCs of Imgur as well as my hosting company to make sure Haasie's covered the most important aspects.
Imgur atm still allows for NSFW, although presumably this will change. But as it stands the contents of these TOCs are not dissimilar from Imgur's or any other file hosts that allow for NSFW content.
To clarify Haasie is not intended to be a specifically NSFW host - like RedGIF someone here mentioned - but rather to host any legal content, which includes NSFW.
Emphasis here is on legal. The intention behind the TOCs is to specifically prohibit the use of the service for anything illegal or otherwise prohibited by the hosting company. And to state that Haasie will act on any content that is found to be in violation of the TOCs.
thanks for the answer :) really, not trying to "gotcha", just was curious if your read of your current TOC was compatible with your goals. I didn't meant to indicate you were exclusively looking for nsfw (but I see how what I wrote implied it), just more a coffee thought while reading this thread :)
My intention is not to be a free host though - that's not sustainable. I hope to fund it through donations and potentially a subscription for enhanced features.
Sites like catbox[.]moe are popular and most months seem to fail to cover all their expenses with donations. And that's using cheap hosting (ovh, hetzner, etc, and no CDN), I imagine that your Fastly bill will be higher than theirs.
For this to work, I think you need to find revenue sources right away and run it as cheaply as possible, otherwise you'll run into problems, creating more link rot in the process.
Thank you!
My thinking is to start with donations. There is no such thing as a free service. If people get value from using it to upload anonymously and they want to keep it going, makes sense to donate.
In the future I could also add a subscription account for additional features, access to an API, bigger upload limits, transformations, greater ability to organise, etc.
Is there a backup plan? Not saying that relying on donations is impossible, but realistically there is a very small chance that enough donation will flow in continuously.
Your question honestly got me thinking. If everything goes completely sideways there are a number of shuttering options I can think of.
One is to turn off any new uploads, and just serve the existing content, presumably the bandwidth on old content would be much lower - until some sustainable plan can be devised.
Last resort is to approach the ArchiveTeam mentioned here to see if and we could to setup a maintenance service.
To your side note, yes, I want to promote it on Reddit, as soon as I've added a few more features - like donations.
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