to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
right now: the governance is pretty simple so we haven't bothered to enumerate it anywhere or anything. in the future we probably will now that we have a lot more users. we've talked through a lot of this stuff in the year and a half of the website to this point.
for the time being: it's the three of us admins (me, Gaywallet, Chris Remington) currently and on anything more substantial than "obviously bad faith person" we tend to collectively talk through decisions to the best ability possible/time permitting. if we add more admins, they'll also have that kind of input. unless otherwise stated you can pretty much assume we've all agreed to something if it's in effect here. it's not explicitly written anywhere, but i'd also say we're interested in community input when possible (and within the confines of the mission we have), because we don't have a website without users, lol
on the backend, Chris currently controls the website, pays our bills, and stuff like that, but all three of us have access to the components that run the website and the financials. in the event he has to step away or something similar, we will be able to take control as needed.
in the very, very long term and feasibility permitting we would like to have some sort of democratically elected board controlling the website and its broader goal (ideally a co-operative),[^1] but right now we're really just trying to keep the website going and be financially solvent.
hopefully that sort of gives an idea--i'm sure the other mods may have input here also, so i'll shoot them this comment in the morning
[^1]: and yeah, we're aware of the potential drawbacks and points of failure that could introduce, hence why it's a very long term goal. that's a sort of thing we'd need to do responsibly, if we can do it at all!