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.
What if I’m so propagandized by American technofascist social media that I am incapable of believing Marxists would be able to make and maintain a project of this size? How do I donate to the real devs? (/j)
Real question: assuming I’m basically broke, which is more helpful to y’all: a yearly dono of $100 or a weekly pledge of $2?
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 should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
Who are the developers and what instance are they affiliated with?
From the post
Dessalines and I work fulltime on Lemmy to keep up with all the feature requests, bug reports and development work.
So @nutomic@lemmy.ml and @dessalines@lemmy.ml are the developers
You can see from their usernames, they are primarily associated with lemmy.ml, which they are the admins of
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
This update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
Sent my money in. Thanks for what you do with the software, brother.
Have you considered applying for a FUTO grant?
I actually got in contact with them yesterday, will probably have a meeting soon to discuss how we can work together with them.
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 :)
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
❤️
I love lemmy the project. But there has too much political arguments in some communities and they will hate you if you aren’t 100% agree with them. Even the post and the group/community are not political, comments will turn it to political. I am kind of tired(although I know some ppl are thrilled with political arguments). There is not much the devs can do, but the content does affect the user experience quite a lot.
Nevertheless, thanks for all the hard work, nutomic and dessalines. I will donate.
Fully agree that theres too much politics. Like you say too often about attacking some kind of enemy rather trying to understand other perspectives. For better or for worse, those seem to be the types of people more likely to use a new platform like Lemmy. Hopefully in the future they will also get tired of this stuff.
Unfortunately Reddit and their mods/admins behaviour over the years show that the opposite will happen. When the Lemmy mods are already so militantly anti-open discussion and authoritarian, they’re not going to soften up - they’ll go even further towards the dictatorship they clearly desire.
I’d love to donate or even start contributing towards the code myself, but the current environment that is being fostered on the big “default” communities and instances is like Reddit on steroids, just speedrunning to the end game of mass bans and mod abuse - and I don’t envision myself wanting to be a part of that for too long. I wiped and deleted by 15+ year old reddit account because of what it had turned into.
I don’t know the solution, but something needs to be done at a system level to give users a way to remove mods and change how communities are managed.
I don’t know the solution, but something needs to be done at a system level to give users a way to remove mods and change how communities are managed.
Maybe just start an instance where politics are banned?
Doesn’t solve the problem of “default” communities with shitty mods.
I feel sorry for your situation. But at least in lemmy the dev are willing to try to resolve this problem. Low chance is still better than zero chance.
Here is an wild idea. Since a few communities are so divided and clearly they only have a good time when they talk to ppl exactly like them. Flame war happens when two groups of hardcore opposed users argue. Since normal users won’t have all days to argue with either side, if one side leaves, the wars is ended.
So instead of banning users by admin or blocking one users each time by users. Can we have allow users to create their own public group (or a gang)? Users can join any groups. Instead of blocking one user, users can simply block the whole group. Posts and comments will be hided if blocking.
Advantages:
- No banning is needed means admin’s time and gang members’ time can be saved.
- finally no one disagree with those gangs members anymore, so I guess they’re happy
- instead of using time from admin and uninvolved users, users who frequently involved controversial topics everywhere should spend their own time to create a group for staying in their comfort zone.
- uninvolved users don’t have to read all those flame war
Disadvantages:
- those gangs become more extreme cuz they miss the opportunity to understand each other
- dev have to do more work
- server may have more load
- some users might say those gangs should host their own instances
Ps: I don’t use the term community because our board is also called community. I don’t want to mix them up. May be i should call it users group, but I am too lazy. I do agree better word should be used.
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 ;-)
Thank you :)
Absolutely agree! :) thank you very much for stating this.
I personally block hexbear, and de facto ignore lemmy.ml because I find it to be a hive of vitriol and unproductive toxic behaviour, but I still signed up to donate because imho, lemmy’s open and decentralized nature make it fundamentally valuable and a worthwhile piece of societal infrastructure.
But please don’t abuse our trust.
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!
lemmy.ml is run by the developers?
Yes, it’s the “original” instance
Kinda but the overlap between lemmy ml admin/mod team and lemmy developers is not 100%
I don’t really mind which way I donate but I want to ensure I donate by giving the most money to lemmy and not to whatever platform is hosting it.
While I am not particularly interested in setting up crypto, aside from that which platform would you prefer I donated from?
Liberapay is the best option, because it doesnt take any fees beyond payment processing, and its also open source. Thanks for donating!
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
Really wish Nutomic would apologize for it, it’s depressing.
The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time.
not an apology. wish you were still banned.
you can do better
Can you please just apologize to those who were offended and promise to be more sensitive moving forward? That’s the sure-fire way to defuse the allegations accusing you of being a transphobe and put everybody at ease.
Refraining to comment further on the topic is smart until you learn more about the dynamics at hand. Transgender individuals face an unprecedented amount of discrimination and vitriol.
If anything, the bourgeoisie are generally polarizing people against each other, particularly pitting people against others who are different or who are in vulnerable positions.
Are we to assume you think this is an apology?
Page not found.
Just scroll down 👇
There is nothing to scroll, it just says
GoException: no routes for location: /post/29579005/18404108?hint=29579005/18404108&hintInstance=lemmy.ml
That sounds like a your app problem. Try using a browser.
Nutomic is transphobe?
going as far as putting lgbt flags on government buildings
This motherfucker actually fell for rainbow capitalism
I realize that it was a mistake to post that. The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time. So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future. In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
I’m gonna be candid with you this is what your comment reads like (to me):
I realize that it was a mistake to post that.
But not to think it.
The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time.
The controversy is between the oppressed and oppressors. It’s “complex” because you don’t stand in solidarity with the oppressed.
So I will refrain from commenting on it in the future.
But continue to think like that and act accordingly in silent
In any case I’m happy that there are so many transgender people on Lemmy.
Since it keeps them out of sports?
Okay the last one was a joke because it feels like such an empty phrase after the non-apology preceding it. I’ve been putting off reading this for a long time, but will pledge to do so now starting today. Join me.
From “Combat liberalism”:
To let things drift if they do not affect one personally; to say as little as possible while knowing perfectly well what is wrong, to be worldly wise and play safe and seek only to avoid blame. This is a third type [of liberalism].
Edit: Tomorrow is the anniversary of the attack on the Institute for Sexual Sciences which got famous as the nazi’s book burnings. There will not be a better time to start reading Feinberg than now.
This response itself belies a chauvanism which is not befitting of a communist. Socialism requires the liberation of all, and queer workers face super-oppression due to their status as being queer or trans.
A solid stance on queer liberation is critical for socialists to have because queer people are one of the many groups in society that due to their super-oppression can act as lightning rods for conflict against the bourgeois state.
I recommend this article on Leslie Feinberg and hir life. It’s critical as communists to have the right stance on this much in the same way as supporting AES and National Liberation, and dismissive attitudes such as your initial reaction here betray a chauvanism that other revolutionaries or oppressed people will likely find sickening. I don’t say this to demean the possibility of your growth, but instead to say that I want to see your growth on this issue and to take the right stance.
this is a half-assed non-apology and basically a promise not to grow or learn anything about trans people (people, not a “topic”; frankly dehumanising). are you a marxist or not?
I just found out about this and honestly this is a disappointing response. Apparently this happened a while ago from what I gather, but your response right now is to say it is a complex and controversial topic? No one is born knowing, but this is something you as communist should be well informed about. The fact that Hexbear has a ton of transgender users alone should be enough to reevaluate such position. Please go about doing proper research and asking trans people for resources they can provide for debunking your transphobic views. Do not refrain from talking about in the future, you need to genuinely engage in this to be able to change such views. If you’re truly willing to learn and change, you need to demonstrate that. I doubt any trans communist, specially on Hexbear, wouldn’t be willing to help you come around on your views.
I think it’s best that yes you are learning, but you shouldn’t refrain, you should be continuing your discussion so you can learn your blindspots and aim better.
If you asked me like ~4 years ago about some stuff like DID, I was insensitive and I have learned better. The continued conversation is what enabled me to continue progress in understanding.
I do hope you are learning better and this isn’t to brush it aside, but I always hope for betterment until proven wrong.
Do you also think that eg when corporations celebrate Black History Month that the bourgeoisie is also pro-Black? Capitalism has a vested interest in neutering and subsuming liberation movements so that they cannot pose a threat to capital itself, and also of course, as groups such as LGBTQ+ people become less socially stigmatised, it becomes worth it profit-wise to market towards these demographics specifically as the financial hit from bigots becomes less. We can see this reverse in real time in the US as it becomes more profitable to appeal to social reactionaries, showing that any appeals to “pride” were, as queer people have been saying all along, a marketing campaign and nothing deeper.
I don’t think this comment at all suffices. If you’re going to be a communist, then you need to put the effort in to engaging with all struggles for emancipation, and that includes trans people’s struggles. You shouldn’t “refrain from commenting on” liberation struggles; you should be supporting them.
You make some good points. But keep in mind that I dont live in the United States, and I have never even met a transgender person irl. For me this is something which is only discussed online, so Im missing a lot of context and information. Case in point, I had no idea what “Black History Month” is and had to look that up. Anyway if I discuss this topic further it will be through an anonymous alt account, to avoid any further drama.
I also don’t live in the United States; do you think trans people only exist in the US? Transfemicide is an even bigger issue in the global south; for instance, Brazil, a global south country, is notorious for its high transfemicide rates, and has a strong transfeminist movement as a result. There will be trans people in all countries who face transphobia, and the countries lacking a particularly noticeable trans liberation movement will be because transphobia is so bad there that trans people feel the risk of speaking out is too great.
I do suggest that you put some effort into educating yourself and engaging with trans and LGBTQ+ struggles where you are, which will not just be “online”. I don’t know where you live, but at worst it will just be the case that the trans people where you are, are not inclined to become political militants because of both transphobia in general meaning they put an even bigger target on their heads, and transphobia on the left that is common across the world meaning that trans people feel unwelcome in organising spaces. This is not related to the original topic of donations, I mean this just for the sake of your politics. If you really can’t find any kind of organised political activity around trans issues where you are, you could at least read transfeminist texts, and tbh feminist texts in general, since feminist theory (including Marxist feminist theory) has discussed the issue of gender, gender essentialism, and transphobia for decades now. For instance, in relation to your screenshotted dm above, it has been a feminist demand for decades (rescinded upon only because some feminists decided to jump on the anti-trans bandwagon) to desegregate sports, and I think anyone who knows anything about women’s sports knows all the ways in which the gendered segregation of sports harms women athletes’ careers.
You have certainly met a trans person if you’ve met, say, 100 people. You just didn’t recognize them from their appearance or voice, either because they are closeted or because they convinced you they were cis from their appearance and voice. Presumably your country is so oppressive towards trans people that they are too afraid of being out, there are no trans events for you to attend in solidarity, or you are just making excuses for reactionary positions.
Trans visibility is not just in the United States. Out and self-identifying trans people are visible around the world, including the two largest countries, China and India. You can’t visit either imperialized county without meeting someone that is self-identifying themselves as trans. And one of those countries is run by a communist party.
These responses just sound like a reactionary unwilling to self-crit. And I don’t see much in the way of any alt accounts: the people criticizing thoss non-apologies and continued ignorant statements generally don’t have any replies.
Do open self-crit and try to learn from those who know better.
Did you also unban and apologize to the person that posted that DM?
Also, transgender people are people, not a topic. Imagine for example describing some sort of debate surrounding black people as “the black topic”.
Exactly.
I will consider contributing financially to Dessalines but not nutomic so long as they spread and maintain reactionary positions against trans people. To be honest I’m even on the fence about Dessalines for maintaining a public relationship with nutomic in light of this.
“Give money to a transphobe so we can have open source Reddit” doesn’t have a great ring.
Nutomic has also stated that donations for Lemmy development also go towards server costs for .ml… Yeah, no thanks. That’s a massive issue with the way funding is handled.
So when are you donating?
Donations are the Devs income stream, so they are in fact paying for .ml out of their own pocket. “funding development” doesn’t actually mean anything beyond “paying the developer’s wages” for Lemmy, so once you’ve paid them you don’t get a choice in how they spend their income.
Refusing to make someone’s financial situation easier until they stop being transphobic is not a convincing argument against transphobia. Think about how your actions affect your side’s reputation from the other side’s perspective.
I don’t give a fuck about convincing transphobes, I believe they should all be thrown off a cliff along with every other kind of bigot. Obviously, I will not pay a transphobe if I can avoid it.
Oh no wont someone please consider trans peoples reputation from a transphobic perspective?
Rejecting someone that aligns with oppression is a great way to build against oppression, actually. Do you think Jewish Germans should have donated to the Nazis to build up “good faith” with them? Surely if they just acted like, “good Jews” they would have been spared, right?
This logic is typical status quo liberalism that tells you to tut-tut every oppressed group for not fighting back “the right way”. Of course, liberals have never succeeded using the methods they suggest, so this really amounts to telling the oppressed to shut up and die. This talking point is promulgated so that you and others will refuse to work in solidarity with the oppressed. Don’t let yourself be manipulated this way.
Prove that this is not false equivalence fallacy. Maybe there’s additional info about Nutomic that I’m missing.
Why do I need to prove a negative? Get your fallacies in order! I also recommend against relying so much on trying to identity fallacies, as we are not exactly engaging in formal modus tollens here and what I am saying to you is intended to get you to critically engage with what you are saying, not be an unassailable treatise on resistance that covers every eventuality.
Societal liberalism reinforces the status quo, or I should really say, reinforces capitalism, and that tends to mean reproducing oppressions that can be leveraged by capital. Even the existence of reactionaries who marginalize others is often in the interests of caputal. “Don’t blame the people firing you for losing your job, it must be the immigrants doing this to you! Hey, don’t complain about your life, at least you’re not [oppressed group]” These serve very practical functions for disunity among people that could otherwise find common ground against the interests of capital.
The liberal tut-tutting of what is supposedly ineffective opposition is part of this as well. It comes from op-eds from ghoulish warmongers, those complicit in genocide, and a political class invested in you not actually aligning against oppressors in any meaningful way. Notice the complete lack of action from yourself in doung anything about this transphobe. Just pushing against those who do. Ask yourself what role you are playing.
I need additional information, probably about Nutomic’s behavior, to see how it’s related to what you’re talking about.
The information is in the thread you are replying to. And no, you actually don’t, becauae what we are discussing is your paternalistic liberal response to others refusing to donate to a transphobe and then your leaning on debatebro fallacy misunderstandings when I explained what was wrong with it.
If you can’t self-criticize and adapt then just don’t respond.
It was not “debatebro” because nothing I said, except probably my first comment, was debating. Sorry for the confusion.
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.
I signed up for a medium donation.
While I don’t agree with some things happening on .ml We should not discard imperfect allies. Thank you devs for the great work you’re doing.
