- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.ml
- lemmy@lemmy.ml
- asklemmy@lemmy.ml
Hello world,
as many of you probably already know, Lemmy is an open source project and its development is funded by donations.
Unfortunately, as is often the case, donations amounts are often going down over time if people are not aware of their necessity. When older users leave the platform they may stop donating, while new users joining will typically not be aware of this and won’t start donating to even things out or even go towards an overall increase in donations.
All of the services provided by our non-profit Fedihosting Foundation are dependent on the development of FOSS platforms, which we can host without paying any licensing or other fees, instead only being required to pay for the infrastructure cost. We are currently investing a small part (€50 each) of the donations we receive in development of Lemmy and Mastodon, but the majority of the donations we receive are used for covering infrastructure costs. We’re currently just about breaking even with the donations we receive, but it’s certainly not enough to cover a large part of Lemmy or other software development costs.
We’re looking to support sustainable software development for all the services we provide and will post similar announcements on our other platforms to promote donations towards the respective development teams in the coming days.
You can find the original announcement by @nutomic@lemmy.ml below:
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/29579005
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.
edit, as this was frequently brought up:
Will donations to Lemmy development go towards the operation of lemmy.ml?
It depends on the donation method used and is limited to around 2% of the minimum overall donation goal. The vast majority of donations is exclusively used for developer salaries.
lemmy.ml hosting is only financed by donations via Opencollective. All other donations go exclusively to developer salaries.
[source]
For donations via Open Collective, yes, a tiny fraction of donations towards Lemmy development will go towards the operation of lemmy.ml. The reasons for this include that lemmy.ml is used for testing new releases and also that it’s not worth maintaining a separate donation account for the instance. Additionally, it should be noted that the money going towards lemmy.ml hosting is just a tiny fraction of the funds that are being asked for. Hosting lemmy.ml costs around €100/month, which is only 2% of the stated minimum donation goal.
God, no. If Lemmy today is gonna be all spam of the shitheads begging for money then I guess it’s closer to death than I thought
I’ll take a grassroots donation campaign over ads any day.
There are other services that can provide what Lemmy does without supporting their admins where your money would be better off going. Or just use adblockers like an adult, lol
That’s actually been my plan, jump ship when .ml’s toxicity finally sank Lemmy, cuz I’m too lazy to do anything until shit actually happens
Surely you can see how ridiculous you sound.
“i don’t want to support the open source, non-ad driven platform that won’t harvest and sell my data. So I’m going to go to platforms that do that and try to dodge their attempts instead.”
Let’s ignore the fact that you are probably not good enough to get away with what you think you are (an ad blocker is not going to give you real privacy), you really don’t see the benefit to having a platform that just… Doesn’t do that shit?
If that’s not the case, then leave. But don’t sit here and try to spike attempts at making this sustainable.
Personal anecdote: after going vegan a few years ago, a lot of criticisms of veganism I’ve seen have taught me that these kinds of holier-than-thou attacks of less-than-perfect action often come from people who don’t want to take any action themselves.
The cognitive dissonance arises that the people taking action feel good about what they’re doing, and they suddenly feel deep down like they could be doing something wrong by not taking action. To resolve it, in lieu of taking action, they justify why they shouldn’t, usually “well that’s not literally perfect, so actually why should I should do anything?” Meanwhile, the people taking the less-than-perfect action are even more painfully aware of its flaws but are putting in the work to do better than they would’ve been otherwise.
This is definitely a good comparison!
FWIW: I hate seeing all the mockery vegan people get. I think a lot of people project this idea that you all think you’re superior, when ultimately you’re just making a decision that inconveniences you more than anybody else.
Putting a lot of words in my mouth there, bud
My problem is with this specific platforms owners, and I never advocated for the alternative of corp sites
Calm down and think for 3 seconds next time
If you just leave this bullshit our of your replies, nobody would think you’re a raging, idiot narcissist. Write and then delete it, if that makes you feel better, but nobody is ever going to engage with you in good faith while you act like this.
If you think I’m that because of the reply to the guy who wanted about me based on nothing that’s a you problem, homie
They already weren’t, as you already saw, guy just made a whole AU fanfic about me. Not surprising, they do shit like that regularly according to the user note I have
You know telling people to calm down is inherently antagonistic and doesn’t cool off the conversation so how about you stop and think for 3 seconds next time before bashing your face into your keyboard and gracing us with whatever inane bullshit dumps out of your head.
Says the dickwad calling me ridiculous and rambling about whatever came to their mind
Someone’s mad I called out their shitty take, whine harder
I’m fine. You seem rather angry. You should calm down.
Then jump
Does it look like it’s sunk? I get that you .ml people aren’t the brightest bulbs in the box but you can usually do better than that
^ the non-toxic instance users, everyone
You’re concern trolling and wrecking in multiple donations threads created to support the platform and the devs who created it. You can just leave and join one of the alternatives instead.
Careful, someone might see that and say that your observation does not mater because your from .ml
$100 says you’re only here because you got booted from Reddit for shitty behavior, not unfair treatment, the rampant enshittification, or a belief that FOSS or the Fediverse are better. Just donated another $10 to compensate for your “the ‘F’ in FOSS stands for freeloading” ass.
Cool, send me my money cuz you can trace this account right back to the API incident on Reddit. Nice try, dipshit
Cool, waste your money, stay mad you pathetic bootlicker
Can I, though? Can I really trace it?
I’ve told the story before: told an admin on Reddit calling anyone who played Hogwarts: Legacy transphobic an idiot
That was months before the API disaster, I had been using an alt for quite a while
That’s also not this account, which is the one I was talking about. What’s up with the people in my replies doing absolutely 0 fucking thinking today?
I mean, that’s a fundamental part of many open source projects. I recently got an email from a few asking for the same because of economic troubles, and many people are feeling the squeeze right now and cut their donations first.
It doesn’t necessarily mean that a project is about to fail. But it’s often the case that with better support, they could aspire to do more.
Spamming the entire page of every instance is not a fundamental part of FOSS projects, and is just another example of the dogshit Lemmy devs being dogshit
You do realise that it was each instance admin that posted outside of .ml They only posted once. I feel like this is obvious, but posting once and having others cross post is not spamming
they either have insane funding and no releases, or low to no funding and constant releases lol
Look frankly I don’t love this, but how the hell else do you expect this to get done? We can’t just expect people to work for free all the time in a predominantly capitalist world. They have to eat.
Are you developing the platform? Do you have another idea for How to pay their bills?
I dont, specifically because of who the money goes to
They can also just not continue development if they don’t get the money. That’s a fine option, too
No, and many, but it’s also not my concern at all given the shitstains the developers are
If they stop development this all dies.
Oh no! Not like there are alternatives we could swap to immediately!
Lemmy is the vast majority of Reddit-like community. Mbin is fledgling, Kbin is dead. A few others puttering around.
It wouldn’t necessarily be the end of the world, but that’s a pretty fucking hard reset if Lemmy collapses. There are a lot of of us here who really like being here.
they expect other ppl to tap in, they think they are stopping other ppl from helping lol
.ml is needed for development. I’d support its existence even if I’d rather defederate.
An instance is, it does not have to be theirs or run the way they do
Sounds like a really good reason to not make that incredibly important test instance so shitty and toxic then, but that’s the choice they made.
I know your not from .world, but if we are talking about toxic instances, in my experence the worst ones have been beehaw and world.
Holy shit, from your comment history it does not surprise me at all that you think that.