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.
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.
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! :)
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 ☺️
Donated , kudos for XMR option
Thanks for the work that you are doing.
Signed up on Patreon.
PSA: Patreon takes a large cut from the donations last I checked. I call it convenience tax. Basically the same convenience but no cut you can use liberapay. They’re the cemocratic version so to speak.
But thanks for participating. I appreciate fellow dobators.
.world and .ee must be benefitting financially from your work; are they helping at all?
There are donors from both of their communities
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
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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.
“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.
Yes, I agree. Maybe that will happen, or maybe it won’t.
Experience has shown that when others try, they stumble significantly.
GOOD point
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Just donated via ko-fi!
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.
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.
Your donation isn’t going to that
Keep using it and support whatever replacement comes by if they fail to find because of the Deb’s shitty behavior
Best of luck!
Thanks!
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.
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
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?
Maybe, but thats up to the individual app developers.
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:
Best of luck with this. Would you guys find it helpful if you had more GH contributors?
You mean more people making pull requests? Of course, code contributions are always welcome.
Absolutely, lemmy could use so much more dev help.
I wish you wouldn’t use GitHub but an open source forge, though.
Thanks for the reminder!
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.
I can see how that would feel good, but unless they were selling ads directly to friendly companies (and even disregarding the fact that it seems unlikely there would be many/any given their anticapitalist bent), this would make the project almost no money, while annoying users and opening them up to a lot of criticisms and a lot of overhead work building it and keeping that system running. Plus the vast majority of instances would probably not willingly run ads to benefit the devs, either due to not wanting ads or political disagreements with the devs, so it’d be only lemmy.ml and some micro instances. A nominal donation of $1/month from users like you, who may not want to spend much but does want to support in some way, would make them more money than a years worth of browsing
Also at least 99% of Lemmy users run adblockers, so no one would want to advertise in the first place lol.
I think we’d all prefer you just post and spread the community that way.
This motivated me to donate 3 € per month. Not a big one but I am doing my part! I could also make a post at !meta@sopuli.xyz about the subject.
Thank you!
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.
Donated via LiberaPay for 1 year.
Wouldn’t have an alternative to Reddit without it—so, by all means
Donated with renewal! Thank you all for the hard work 😁
Same! Keep up the good work!
