Tumblr migration, updated goals, and closing registrations (Patreon)

I’d like to first say that I cannot express enough my gratitude to every patron for putting their faith in this community to stay alive, especially in the face of growing censorship and arbitrary account terminations from other social media platforms.

However, I am sad to announce that baraag will not be able to move to a dedicated server at the original goal I set at $70 per month. I sorely underestimated the Tumblr migration, as the local userbase for the community went up in just under a week from 2,000 to almost 5,000 at the time of writing this. Scrambling to allocate more resources with the current VPS hosted plan, the cost of running the server to sustain the heavy traffic has presently gone up to $80 per month.

As I re-evaluate the scaling growth and active users that baraag has taken on (mostly from tumblr), I quickly realized that I cannot meet the stated goal of upgrading the community to a dedicated server at $70. I want to greatly apologize to anyone who pledged in support of finally meeting the expected goal. It is likely the actual updated cost of upgrading this large instance to a dedicated server will be close to double the initial estimate, at $140 per month 😔

I also may have to temporarily close registrations to prevent this unprecedented tumblr migration from overloading the hosted VPS as it is, but still allow invites from users for other artists and friends to join. Let me know in the comments your thoughts on all of this.