- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld@lemmy.world
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- lemmyworld@lemmy.world
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
An open source project the size of Lemmy needs constant work to manage the project, implement new features and fix bugs. Dessalines and I work full-time on these tasks and more. As there is no advertising or tracking, all of our work is funded through donations. Unfortunately the amount of donations has decreased to only 2000€ per month. This leaves only 1000€ per developer, which is not enough to pay my bills. With the current level of donations I will be forced to find another job, and drastically reduce my contributions to Lemmy. To avoid this outcome and keep Lemmy growing, I ask you to please make a recurring donation:
Liberapay | Ko-fi | Patreon | OpenCollective | Crypto
If you want more information before donating, consider the comparison with Reddit. It began as startup funded by rich investors. The site is managed by corporate executives who over time have become more and more disconnected from normal users. Their main goal is to make investors happy and to make a profit. This leads to user-hostile decisions like firing the employee responsible for AMAs, blocking third-party apps and more. As Reddit is a single website under a single authority, it means all users need to follow the same rules, including ridiculous ones like censoring the name “Luigi”.
Lemmy represents a new type of social media which is the complete opposite of Reddit. It is split across many different websites, each with its own rules, and managed by normal people who actually care about the users. There is no company and no profit motive. Much of the work is carried out by volunteer admins, mods and posters, who contribute out of enthusiasm and not for money. For users this is great as there is no advertising nor tracking, and no chance of takeover by a billionaire. Additionally there are no builtin political or ideological restrictions. You can use the software for any purpose you like, add your own restrictions or scrutinize its inner workings. Lemmy truly belongs to everyone.
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work. Even so there is barely enough time in the day, and no time for a second job. Previously I sometimes had to rely on my personal savings to keep developing Lemmy for you, but that can’t go on forever. We partly rely on NLnet for funding, but they only pay for development of new features, and not for mandatory maintenance work. The only available option are user donations. To keep it viable donations need to reach a minimum of 5000€ per month, resulting in a modest salary of 2500€ per developer. If that goal is reached Dessalines and I can stop worrying about money, and fully focus on improving the software for the benefit of all users and instances. Please use the link below to see current donation stats and make your contribution! We especially rely on recurring donations to secure the long-term development and make Lemmy the best it can be.
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Update: For those of you who want to support Lemmy development without financing the hosting of lemmy.ml, know that the hosting is paid exclusively through OpenCollective. You can see the payment details at this link. This means donations through all other platforms (Liberapay, Ko-fi, Patreon, Crypto) are exclusively for Lemmy development, and not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
But I want to support lemmy.ml
Then you can donate via Opencollective. But honestly it doesnt matter, because lemmy.ml hosting is already covered, and is very cheap compared to developer salaries.
I appreciate the transparency! :)
This update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
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I advise you to consider the weekly pledge over the one time donation. It would be a better course of action as it might help them plan ahead.
Also, I’m a caveman, so I would advise against following my advice
The real devs are locked into a server room with appropriate supplies of food and caffeine. So dont worry about them.
Yearly or weekly doesnt make a big difference so whatever works for you. Depending on the platform small donations may have higher fees though.
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
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As far as I understand it, the development team of Lemmy is bigger than that, but nutomic and dessalines as the founders and paid to develop lemmy full-time of course are the most important ones.
@sleeplessone@lemmy.ml is a maintainer of lemmy I think and
@dullbananas@lemmy.ca is a maintainer of lemmy backend?
Not sure about the status of flamingos and phiresky who also contribute to the codebase and were part of the recent AMA
Flamingos is a much loved admin of feddit.uk ☺️
Nutomic and Dessalines, and lemmy.ml
Donated , kudos for XMR option
Sent my money in. Thanks for what you do, brother.
This worked on me, I just became a contributor
SCAM!
??? what platform do you think lemmy.world runs?
I thought he was a bot. I was wrong.
You thought Lemmy’s co-founder and main developer is a bot? Lmao
Despite my best efforts I do act like a dumbass at times.
Welcome to the club. And it’s very much not limited only to internet forums.
It happens :p
The internet has made people truly paranoid lol.
We’re currently living in the Grift Age of civilization.
no
You’re correct.
Best of luck raising funds! 👍 Pinned for extra visibility.
Featured, best of luck to the donation drive. The lemmy developers do good work and deserve good pay
I just noticed that featuring will only pin to “All” and not “Local”. It is helpful to cross-post to a local community to pin it more visibly.
Good point, thanks
Has nutomic ever apologized for his transphobia? That behavior should never be rewarded
If I didn’t respond to anyone below, thank you. It means a lot, and makes the years of work I’ve spent on lemmy feel worthwhile and important.
I wanted to say specifically thank you for Jerboa. I only have a phone, so it makes using Lemmy painless.
❤️
It absolutely is. You also inspire people to get into foss and take up the good fight. Thanks for doing this.
Underrated point. I started out with all the usual bloatware and, at best, a rudamentary feeling why that might be bad. I ditched Windows by now and are activly trying to get rid of Google and their likes, replacing more and more apps with foss alternatives. Trying to pull my family in too. That simply not would have happend without beeing exposed to this by Lemmy.
Thats me a year ago. Now i run pretty much 100% foss, have converted some family, run a foss it business and help activists stay safe on electronic devices. I’m not joking. Lemmy was a big part in that.
If I remember correctly, I got exposed to this because of the GNU + Linux interjection copypasta, which made me know about GNU
Donated what I could on a hard month (something something insurance company something something half of my salary), but with heart. If the fundraiser persist, I’ll be glad to donate more next month!
Doubled my monthly donation hopefully more people will do the same.
I’ve been hosting my own instance for two years now without hiccups.
.world and .ee must be benefitting financially from your work; are they helping at all?
There are donors from both of their communities
They do, but also donations are still entirely optional. We’re a soup kitchen providing a free meal; if people don’t want to eat the soup, or eat it but don’t want to (or aren’t able) to support the kitchen, that’s not a problem.
i guess i just don’t like the fact that i’ve paid more than five-star-restaurant for my soup when there are clearly other groups that can afford more and there’s leverage that can be used to everyone’s mutual benefit.
Exactly, this is how I retired at 26
- setup .world
- pay all costs myself
- ???
- profit
Do you really think the people that setup instances make a lot of money?
Afaik they also donate a bit, but they also dont have a lot of money to spare after server costs.
Are they in the same situation as you?
What do you mean? They are also free and if anything running lemmy cost them!?
They’ve developed mobile apps; got Google to prioritize search results for them; and their user bases are motivated & organized enough to share & curate lists of other lemmy users.
They’ve gone well beyond what other instances do and that usually suggests that someone’s getting paid to make it all happen.
They’ve gone well beyond what other instances do and that usually suggests that someone’s getting paid to make it all happen.
I’m sure dessalines and nutomic are also being financed by CCP and FSB to develop a platform for spreading propaganda to the West.
\s perhaps
Do you have citations for any of this?
They work with Google etc?
these come from observations at the time of the reddit blackout diaspora and from watching lemmings accidentally share this information with everyone on lemmy; i’m not willing to be sealioned to look it up for you.
So you have no evidence of this. Ok
My question was certainly not in bad faith since I have never heard anyone say anything like this
You said that already
I’m putting in a dollar a week for the second year now and i plan on keeping it up. If only 1500 people did what I do, we’re completely fine.
If you host an instance, please give a dollar a week. If you spend more than 10 hrs on lemmy per week, please give a dollar. Its not that hard. Think what stuff you pay more for and spend less time o, have less fun on and learn less from.
I also think that big instances should be funneling a portion of their donations to the devs. I send more than I get, which is my choice.
Democracy requires participation.
I’ve set up a recurring payment - thanks for the great work!
Thx!
For someone like me who wants to see Lemmy be a place that’s owned by users, run by users, and moderated sensibly, what should I do? I have a problem with supporting the lemmy.ml instance.
deleted by creator
www.lemm.ee has been the only place I’ve enjoyed using lemmy
The lemmy.ml instance costs like 30$/month to run. Your donation isn’t going to that; your donation is going to develop Lemmy itself
If they do not treat lemmy.ml server donations separately from lemmy development donations, that is a problem.
Nah
I don’t want to block lemmy.ml, it’s not like I hate that instance or anything. But I don’t see why I should finance this server - it’s definitely not just a development server. I would like to finance development of lemmy without that money going into that server.
By donating you are not financing the lemmy.ml server, because that is already long covered with a much lower donation level. Everything above that is exclusively for developer salaries.
Just donated via ko-fi!
That’s not quite how a pool of money works.
Once you fill the gas tank in a motorcycle, you can’t pick which molecules of gas go towards acceleration and which ones go towards idling at a red light.
They need users to test, and let people in to do so. The fact that the people here use the server is a necessary function for getting feedback and results from testing. Plus, the server costs are cheap, it’s the life costs that you would really be supporting.
They can pick a different instance, this is bullshit speak.
Wanna be a dev? Fine. Keep your authoritarian bullshit out of it. The devs for lemmy being known as authoritarians causes new people to avoid lemmy.
They literally created the platform. They can moderate their instance however they like. That’s the point of the platform.
And being “authoritarian” is when you moderate your own server how you see fit, like banning the equivalent of bad faith spamming of My Lai, Tulsa Riot, or the 1985 MOVE Bombing Wikipedia articles and pictures in obvious attempts at anti communism and stirring shit.
What “different instance?” Lemmy.ml has always been the test instance, you can block it if you don’t like dealing with Communists. You’re complaining about an anti-Capitalist, federated platform being developed by Communists, if you want a platform with everyone conforming to your views there are other platforms for you.
Some fraction of my donation would go towards the $30. Any amount of money going from me to .ml, be it $10 or $.00001, is too much.
I know $30 is “not much”, but the amount doesn’t change my principles.
Your donation isn’t going to that
Lemmy instances are already owned and run by their different instance admins and moderators. Regardless of how you feel about Lemmy.ml, development for Lemmy supports all who use different instances.
The alternatives are doing the dev work yourself, or finding a different platform to use.
There are other options… Lemmy development could stop and plenty of people would keep using it in its current atate. Maybe it’d even continue to grow.
Or maybe the developers quit and another team steps in? Open source projects are never fully tied to a single developer team.
The low server cost doesn’t change anything for me. I’m just a person who won’t donate if any amount goes towards keeping that place running under the current admins.
Then teams can fork it if they want, it’s FOSS. Lemmy is adopted because the devs are competent, and a lot of us came here specifically because there are Communists here.
Yes, I agree. Maybe that will happen, or maybe it won’t.
Experience has shown that when others try, they stumble significantly.
GOOD point
“You have to donate to tankie transphobes to support the Reddit alternative” isn’t a great look though. And nutomic has stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards supporting the .ml servers. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled, no matter how you look at it.
I’ve vocally criticized Nutomic’s transphobia, but I have no issue with them being Communists. Further, I already answered the bit about funding Lemmy.ml, let me copy and paste the relevant section:
Further, as @OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml said, the Lemmy.ml costs are very low, it’s the actual life costs that allow development of much-asked for features and maintenance to continue.
The donations pay the devs salaries. Donations pay for their video games, food, etc. What the devs do with their salaries allows them to continue developing Lemmy full time, how they choose to spend their salaries is on them.
Keep using it and support whatever replacement comes by if they fail to find because of the Deb’s shitty behavior
lemmy.ml hosting is exclusively paid via Opencollective. All other donation options go directly into developer salaries, so not a single cent goes to lemmy.ml hosting.
Just donated! Best of lucks.
Thanks!
Thx!
