hello hello everyone! i hope you’re having a great start to your autumn so far.
just want to give a quick thank you to @capjamesg & @Jay for running the very first webweaving workshop, which was a smashing success! thank you everyone who came. we had a huge turnout and we look forward to doing more of these in the future. if you’d like to volunteer to run one for your timezone, please let anyone from the @event-planners know!
our halloween event will be here soon! there will be four ways to participate, ranging in skill level, so anyone can join in! it will run from october 13-27, so keep an eye out for that! (thank you to @xixxii for its hard work creating our event page this year!) we’ll be launching the event page around then.
if you have not subscribed to our newsletter yet, you might be missing out on some cool info! one of the things announced in september’s newsletter was the introduction of our ko-fi, which will be going to server costs and expanding our server capabilities to allow us to create more services for the small web. as promised in that newsletter, here is the current breakdown of costs at the moment:
- Pixelfed: $7/month
- Discourse VPS: $19/month
- FreshRSS & Listmonk VPS: $6/month
- Domain: $41/year
this number might go up as we find things we’re paying for. we were able to cut costs by reducing the amount of discord bots, discontinuing our discord nitro for boosts, and paring down our discord features, which is especially nice as we’ve been using discourse as our main community communication hub. if you have ideas for cosmetic benefits to donating (e.g. badges, colors on discord), please let us know! we’re hoping to explore ideas that doesn’t exclude anyone that cannot donate.
as of right now, there is no immediate need for funds as Baristas are funding these out-of-pocket. since folks have been so generously asking, we decided to set up a fund that can be accessed if we ever do fall into dire straits. as we’ve said many times before, we plan on being around for a long time, and that (unfortunately) requires funds for the services we want our community and the small web at large to have access to.
thank you so much to everyone who’s donated already! 
we’re already up to $13.
we plan on selling stickers in the ko-fi shop later this month! 100% of the money will be given to the server fund.
speaking of donations, i wanted to personally call out to our members who are in the american south, and especially florida, who have been affected by hurricane helene and the upcoming hurricane milton. we are thinking of you. 
please keep us posted as to your safety and let us know if we can do anything to help. right now, i’m personally donating to the feeding florida and food bank of central & eastern north carolina organizations. if you have the extra funds this month, instead of donating to our ko-fi, please consider donating to an organization helping with disaster relief efforts.
as always, thank you all for being here! our community is incredibly supportive, kind, and encouraging to one another because of people like you. thank you for making this part of the web a bit brighter.