- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- announcements@lemmy.zip
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.
Edit: Liberapay is the preferable donation option, as it has very low fees and is also open source.
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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.
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
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 :)
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
Nutomic and Dessalines, and lemmy.ml
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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 ☺️
maybe give incentives like upvote award feature for the respective instance that has been donated to. that way people would be more willing to get something out of it in a more tangible way
What do you mean by “upvote award feature”?
awards that cosmetically work like upvotes in a sense. reddit has them, but they link that to nothing or ad free features.
Bound to donations I dont see why this would be a bad idea. Gives a strong sense of community, especially if theres for example special ones bound to each instance
awards that cosmetically work like upvotes in a sense.
Upvotes are mechanical, maybe there’s a better comparison. I left reddit before they added awards, but I assume the idea is that someone donates and is then able to add a decorative award to their favorite posts they see, maybe limited to giving one award per day?
It’s fun, but on the other hand when I occasionally visit reddit, some posts look like a slot machine with a hundred awards, and even if they don’t mechanically push a post higher, it feels a bit pay-to-win for me, because someone with lots of money can put attention-grabbing awards on posts they like. So I’m not sure where I sit on on those kinds of features, because I do believe that it’s helpful to reward people who have donated, so long as they don’t get an advantage in the community for it.
well it would be tied to financing this platform in my suggestion, so I dont see the issue if the upvotes are the only metric for post ranking and on the other hand awards being only cosmetic
u can always ublock them away if you personally have spite against the look of some icon. but yea there surely is a wrong way to implement such features… as u mentioned a prime contentder for a service gone shady/shill
I see, or simpler yet a special badge which is shown next to donor’s username. Definitely worth considering. Thanks for the suggestion!
may I use this moment to ask you if this is intended (see spoiler formatted section in the post)
EDIT maybe its the photon frontend, I’ll crosspost there too
That might affect whether or not the income is taxable.
.world and .ee must be benefitting financially from your work; are they helping at all?
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?
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?
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.
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
To those who don’t want to give because of the devs’ political views, I’d like to say this goes into improving the Lemmy software our communities here are based on, not making some political podium for the devs in particular.
There’s a lot of rubbish on Lemmy… because it’s the internet. Like the Great Garbage Patch of the Pacific, it collects; but I still like the Ocean. Some people look down particularly on .ml, but personally I think this is unjustified.
In fact, before joining Lemmy I heard some rumour of the controversy and went looking. I certainly disagree strongly with certain things I found, but my impression was of Dessalines and Nutomic treating the Internet as a forum for respectful debate and this Lemmy as a technology project not a personal political force - as many see Reddit as becoming. Well, that was my impression, so I was happy to join, and I’ve not been disappointed.
On this Lemmy software we have many communities, some which vehemently hate each other, but we’re all supported by this foundational software. If it’s too awful to you, you could of course use a different platform, and still federate with the Lemmy communities you love! But we’re still here.
Because, after all, in any real community there are people you don’t get on with, and part of life is about learning what it means to love each other and live together even so. And that goes for every software project too - somewhere, hiding in the dark recesses, is something quite unpalatable intrinsically linked in. If your ideology says you can’t use anything built with such problems, you’d better start building everything yourself.
So, you don’t have to support Lemmy. Even if you use it. You don’t have to agree with my take on it. But I’d like to encourage most of you to consider supporting Dessaline and Nutomic to continue this development work, and not just the bare minimum they need - let it overflow with blessing, since we have received such blessing from them!
…Or you can all send me angry replies for ranting too long on the Internet about something you disagree with ;-)
Absolutely agree! :) thank you very much for stating this.
Thank you :)
Donated on Liberapay.
As others have said, this is financing software development, not a political campaign. I first learned of the fediverse when Reddit removed 3rd party apps, and I felt like my eyes were opened. This is what I want the internet to be, decentralized and running on open source software, and I’m sure I’m far from being alone in this, so thanks to the devs for that.
Also Jerboa is great!
Jerboa is the best, it’s how I browse Lemmy exclusively.
Lemmy default UI should seriously consider a daily donation goal, similar to old Reddit. Implement a backend API to fetch the daily amount needed and the current amount donated, and stick it on the right hand side by all the trending communities. As a stats nerd, this would seriously motivate me to donate more.
Donation nags to users were added in a recent update. I think it shows up in a year from the last popup, so about 11 months away
The timing is randomized for each user, but everyone see it within a year after the update. Main problem is that Google and Apple are very strict about donations inside apps, so we cant show it to mobile users.
Wouldn’t be many users, but would having a separate version on F-Droid be a way to be able to reach some of them?
This just changed with Apple this week and you can now directly list donation options in app btw
Do you have a link with more details? This is what Ive been told:
And like the Vivaldi browser you can get a permanent badge on your name and avatar picture if you donate. im a sucker for those things. and different color depending the amount donated.
Signal does that too
I gladly doubled my monthly contribution. Thank you so much for working on Lemmy! I had no idea you worked on it full-time. That’s insane! It is the first fediverse software I ever used, and it opened my eyes to a whole other side of the internet I didn’t know existed.
Thanks! Yep its been a lot of years of work to get it to this level, but it still astonishes me that a handful of ppl can best reddit / twitter when we put our minds to it.
Quality over quantity I think. From what I’ve seen, the average Lemmy user is significantly more insightful and respectful than the average across other social media platforms. From the development side, you two are free to focus only on what genuinely improves the user experience, without having to worry about investors or some board forcing you to worsen the user experience because profits.
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.
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
Your donation isn’t going to that
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.
If they do not treat lemmy.ml server donations separately from lemmy development donations, that is a problem.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
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SCAM!
Edit: Not a scam. The mods responded to me. I apologize, I’m paranoid.
Removed by mod
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.
From what I can see, what’s stopping a lot of people donating is the fact that donations cover .ml as well, I personally think this is a non-issue, because .ml doesn’t cost much to run (from what I can see).
Would it be possible to split donations for lemmy development, and donations for lemmy.ml?
Yes it would be possible. The question is if people would really be more willing to donate in that case, or if they would look for a different excuse instead.
There are obviously other good reasons for not donating or at least thinking hard about it first.
But removing one bad thing surely couldn’t hurt.
Actually lemmy.ml hosting is only funded via Opencollective, so if you donate through any other platform the money goes entirely to developer salaries.
If that is the case you should make it clear in the description what exactly is being funded on each platform.
I already updated the description on Opencollective to mention this. Other platforms only cover developer salaries like the descriptions say.
I don’t think it was updated when I looked earlier but it looks good now 👍
You might consider adding to the descriptions on the other platforms that .ml is explicitly excluded considering that many seem to be confused but that’s up to you.
That seems unnecessary because most people dont care. There is a vocal minority which keeps complaining but they dont need to be appeased any more.
There’s also the fact that Nutomic is a known transphobe, and donating to lemmy’s development means supporting said transphobe. If we could get non-problematic devs, that would be ideal. But until then, the only real options are “use Reddit” or “support a tankie transphobe.” And neither is a great choice.
tAnKiE
You are on a “tankie” website made for and by tankies
piefed.social fedia.io joinmbin.org join.piefed.social
what does a cia-backed color revolution in hungary 70 years ago have to do with lemmy?
no, no no they mean the modern definition of tankie: Someone left of Kamala Harris (everyone knows she’s as left as it gets before you horseshoe theory around and become red fash)
Lemmy.ml is the dev test instance, for one, and for two, the donations are to pay the devs wages, which allows them to dev Lemmy full time. You’re essentially saying you want to control what the devs of Lemmy can pay for with their salaries at that point.
What’s wrong with dev.lemmy.ml enterprise.lemmy.ml and ds9.lemmy.ml?
That aside, I think that there would be enough people who would donate to .ml, I read somewhere that it was €30/month, which doesn’t seem like much.
The fact that there aren’t a lot of users to give feedback. Lemmy.ml is like a public beta channel, in a way.
true, but if it gets more people to donate, I think it would help.
We always put out calls before (major) releases, but very few ppl actually help test. This means a lot of bugs only get spotted when more eyes see them in production.
All of these issues are solved in the corporate world by paying quality assurance / testing teams, but open source projects don’t have those resources.
Just did the $5 donation on patreon. It’s on a lot but I hope it helps, I might not agree with everything the founders believe in but I really appreciate this open sourced community and the ideas and conversations I’ve had on it. It’s definitely worth supporting
Thank you, all donations help :)
Literally all we need is everyone to kick in a couple bucks a month and I think everything would be in great shape. I think the user base is like 65k+ users currently?
Around 50k, it went back down from the recent high of 57k.
This is really interesting. Thanks for this link (and for all the work you do on Lemmy in general).
Do you have a preference as to which platform the donation is done through?
Liberapay is preferable as it has low fees and is also open source.
Thank you, Liberapay it is. Keep up the good work!
Ok so personally I really wouldn’t mind having some non-tracking ads in a banner somewhere to at least support a bit (perhaps on an opt-in system). This’d allow me to support lemmy just a little bit every time I use it.
Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything… It reminds me of the vegan fuss era.
You still use lemmy’s backend and have a safe frontend space to stay. That’s kinda hypocrite to use a service that is “anti-lgtb” and still make a fuss about it. If lemmy really was about racial or sexual discrimination you would already know it.
It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use… Uuhhhg it’s kinda getting out of hand !
What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators. If you’re a just a dumb leech, use a service that somehow “discriminates” you, don’t donate, but PLEASE ! Leave.
Go Vegan :)
Why do LGTBQ+xyz10 always have to make a fuss about everything…
Because the group (collectively) have a history of being systematically killed and lynched for their sexuality, not to mention the rest of the suppression and oppression. So politics and attacks are taken seriously.
It also reminds me all the fuss about THEIR safe game space only THEM are allowed to use…
It’s pretty reasonable to create a community where they feel comfortable and kick out all the unconstructive trolling and arguments that people can find in a million other places. Lemmy.ml kicks out racists and other reactionary wastes, so you’re in a comparable safe space right now. Do you enjoy the lack of Nazi scum and rabid anti-socialist trolls? I do!
What ever, my point is, if you want to keep Lemmy alive, help out and donate to the creators.
Many of those comrades have already done this, judging by their comments on various instances.
Just gauging the sentiment towards lemmy.ml, even in the fediverse there needs to be a safe space for people. It’s sad to say, but merely jumping ship from reddit doesn’t ensure that comrades will be safe online. .world and .ee users seem to be reddit-esque but just in a different ilk. I regularly see users from those communities targeting .ml users and since the reddit exodus it’s only gotten worse. Stay strong comrades.
It’s sad to say, but merely jumping ship from reddit doesn’t ensure that comrades will be safe online. .world and .ee users seem to be reddit-esque but just in a different ilk.
It’s no secret that most people on Lemmy came from reddit at some point, and people left reddit for different reasons. The first big waves of users were from piracy subreddits, /r/GenZedong’s quarantine (went to Lemmygrad, which became the biggest federated instance at the time) and /r/ChapoTrapHouse (succeeded by Hexbear, the largest instance at the time). So because these groups were large, whole and somewhat outliers to reddit overall, there was only some broader reddit culture carried across.
The next big waves were with the API fiasco and Luigi censorship, which largely went to general-purpose instances like .world and .ee for various reasons. Their move was most likely about disdain with the admins’ choices or being forced off the platform, not any opposition to reddit culture in general, so the shift toward reddit-esque community was immediately clear. And while Lemmy has a few design decisions that materially disincentive things like karma-farming, it will take a while, and most likely effort, if we want to counter or improve that culture.
Yeah, makes sense. I was part of the reddit exodus with the api stuff. Although, I’m not someone that would be part of the typical reddit culture. Or at least the die-hard libs types. I always was on the fringes of reddit, and in the last few years I stayed away more often than not. There are a few forums and “smol web” places I visit. Even frequent irc occasionally. So, I’ve been out of the loop when it comes to the general reddit mentality. It sucks that those types have to take the piss out of .ml users so frequently though, it’s gotten pretty annoying lately with people saying stuff like “of course, it’s a .ml user” like we’re some type of pariahs.
Because the group (collectively) have a history of being systematically killed and lynched for their sexuality, not to mention the rest of the suppression and oppression. So politics and attacks are taken seriously.
I get that… And that’s a very serious issue and concern for whatever group you’re defending ! But com’on we are on lemmy here, not on some obscure, harsh dictatorship killing people. Some of the admin may have said something inappropriate (that’s arguable…) But that doesn’t take away that we all can thrive here as a community, what ever your color, sexual orientation, religion…
Without the lemmy devs and others, there wouldn’t even be any Lemmy at ALL. Seeing how it goes, this is going to ruine everything for everyone…
Lemmy’s backend allows to create every safe space and community you want and people will still go one and argue against a personal opinion that didn’t killed a fly…
What ever. This kind of mentality is going to ruin the fun for everyone…
Oh yeah, vegans were so fussy with their demands that you
Checks notes
Stop eating the dead flesh of abused animals that are bred in horrific death factories.
I always found carnists more obnoxious than vegans. Anytime you see a vegan offered a meat product and they politely turn it down like “oh no thanks” some idiot is always like “👁️👄👁️ ArE YoU VeGaN? I LikE BaCoN! HaHa I’M GoInG To EaT An ExTrA BuRgEr NoW To AnNoY YoU! MMM!” Like fuck off and let them eat their tofu, you dick.
You even get sick fucks slipping vegans meat and then laughing about it to them later like “HAHAHA I MADE YOU EAT MEAT!” cool bro, how would you feel if I made you eat your dog, you sociopath.
If you sincerely can’t keep track of an acronym like LGBTQIA2S, I totally understand. I find it helpful to use people with minority “Sexual Orientations and Gender Identites” (SOGI). You could say
people with minority SOGIs
Or
SOGI minorities
Or
SOGIm
It’s not a super widespread abbreviation, so I’d recommend spelling it initially as I did in my first paragraph. I don’t think it’s best practice to say “SOGIs” Because everyone has a SOGI and typically we’re trying to talk specifically about those that face(d) disenfranchisement and bigoted violence.
If you’re not sincerely struggling with the acronym, and enjoy trivializing people for fun, I hope you think of me everything you stub your toe.
It’s LGBTQ, Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans and Queer. Atleast pretend to be literate while you demean us and our hard fought victories to simply be able to live with dignity and respect that all people are due.
Yeah :) Just don’t forget to add all the other groups (+) !
That’s so original I bet no queer person has ever heard that one before
