- 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.
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
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.
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