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 @[email protected] 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.
https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18374613
I’ll donate money to individual instances, but for as long as Nutomic/Dessalines is in charge of the .ml instance I will not be donating to them.
This is, unfortunately, the necessary view to take. Lemmy the software is a net positive, but nobody should be giving money to support their extremism and love of censorship, particularly when it happens on what’s arguably the “official” instance.
Numotic and Dessalines actively cultivate very toxic content:
- Pro-Russia, blaming Ukraine as a Nazi aggressor;
- Pro-Chinese Communist Party, banning discussion of the mistreatment of the Uighur minority or the anti-democratic takeover of Hong Kong;
- Anti-Semitic, going way beyond the confines of criticism of the current Israeli government, on to hateful comments about all Israelis as a people, and sometimes Jews in general,
- Pro-Communism, at times advocating for the violent overthrow of Western governments by Marxist groups.
- Strongly in favor of left wing dictatorships, like Venezuela, decrying any discussion of human rights and democracy as capitalist propaganda.
If you disagree with these positions, too bad! Because your posts will be deleted, or you’ll get banned, or your instance defederated, from ml.
Not judging and correct me if I got it wrong. You like Lemmy and want to support it but you personally don’t like the developers of Lemmy?
I don’t like what they’re doing, they are actively using their positions and instances position of influence to push harmful propaganda, misinformation, censor opinions critical of it and all the while turning a blind/lenient eye to what their users do if they consider them to be ideologically aligned with them.
If they actually surrendered .ml admin duties to a more balanced team that actually allowed non-Tankie mods to well mod, I would reconsider donating.
While I consider their “ideology” to be harmful, if they stopped trying to “infuse” Lemmy with it and separated their work from their personal politics it would satisfy a lot of concerns
That’s a lie you are free to run your own instance
Thank you. Seems I was correct then.
How do they exploit their position as devs to push their political agenda? Do they add something to the code that gives them some exclusive benefits?
If you mean they just host their own instance, isn’t it the whole point of Lemmy and what all the other instances are doing? Some even block other instances that do not match their political bias to not ruin their echo chamber. I mean I’m on lemmy.world which probably would be more accurately named lemmy.ultra.left.usa for some time now.
I fully understand you not wanting to support lemmy.ml financially and want to point out that only one donation method is used to help hosting it, all the others will not benefit lemmy.ml exclusively but will benefit all the other instances and lemmy as a whole.
How do they exploit their position as devs to push their political agenda? Do they add something to the code that gives them some exclusive benefits?
Look at how the .ml instance is positioned. People will hear “That instance is run by the devs and all support and other official development comms are on it” and will automatically gravitate to it and the reputation of Lemmy as a whole becomes tied to it. And other instances are hesitant to defed from it because of that.
So now the devs are in a defacto position of influence, regardless of if they want it or not. Now they have a choice, they can moderate it fairly and unbiased (i.e. not using it to further their personal politics) or separate its day to day operations to another admin team. As another commentator in this thread put it “The devs should do dev work and not mod work, and the admin team should do mod work and not dev work”
They’ve already proven that they cant do the first choice so now the only viable option is the second one, which they’re probably not gonna address.
If you mean they just host their own instance, isn’t it the whole point of Lemmy and what all the other instances are doing? Some even block other instances that do not match their political bias to not ruin their echo chamber. I mean I’m on lemmy.world which probably would be more accurately named lemmy.ultra.left.usa for some time now.
Because of my first point, they tied all sorts of official development stuff to .ml, many instances don’t want to defederate because of that and the perception (it doesn’t really hold when you look at MAUs) that they have the biggest comms on lemmy, it’s almost akin to holding them hostage in my eyes “if you or your mods want official on-lemmy lemmy support, official announcements or access to Lemmys BIGGEST comms then you HAVE to stay federated with us!”
Things would be different if they were just running a personal instance with no official Lemmy anything on it, then it would be much easier for instances to make a defederation decision, just like the rest of the triad
Donating to Lemmy development is a donation to .ml. They make it that way. If you don’t want to donate to an authoritarian instance, then you can’t donate to development. It’s not very complicated.
How so when they specifically say only one type of donations will go to the ml?
Yikes, this is big for me. I love Lemmy but I have strong aversions against funding bad politics, even if they aren’t politicians.
What kind of views and ideologies are they pushing? Also are they a couple or something?
Putn is right, ukranians are nazis so all crimes against them are in dact blessings. Baltics are next and all need to die for being under german occupation in the past. Don’t you dare critisize agent kresnov! Etc etc. vile crimes against humanity shit, homophobia and anti lgbtq propaganda.
People who want russia to dominate the world.
Are you saying the developers of Lemmy are of these opinions?! If so, that’s absolutely horrible. I want to support the development of Lemmy, but I want to do the opposite of supporting people like that! I want to take money from people like that!
Feel free to check “MeanwhileOnGrad” yourself.
Just linkifying this for mobile users: [email protected]
I’m scared. Is that a community?
No i will never donate , this format is just jerking off Linux enthusiast, and every time I say Linux in unusable I get negatively marked. Content on this is not so good.its many time repeat of Reddit. There is not a easy way or guide on how to use Lemmy and connect to all differn t forums within or even find them .
In total this format is useful but not encouraging. So no donations
I donated a few bucks.
I see the controversy in the comments section, but none of us would be here if it wasn’t for the work of the devs.
I remember internet forums in the 90s and early 2000s and I’ve played MMO civilization roleplaying Minecraft servers with IRL nazis, takies, fascists, etc. Some of those communities made 4Chan look like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. From my own experience ml has “character” and so do beehaw and dbzer0. These cultural differences are enabled by decentralized social media. There’s validity to the idea that the sign-up process should capture more of these nuances. You don’t have to look any further than your own instance to find bad takes and imperfect admins and moderators, but they’re still the best of the best because they actually did it and the people talking about them didn’t. Maybe I’m uneducated on this and I’ll change my mind, but as it stands I’m cool until they force tank emojis on .world users.
I do think it’s good that this type of talk happens, as it allows instances to develop a reputation.
Not while the devs run a pro-genocide echo chamber. Tankie punks fuck off.
I was a paid patreon member which was supposed to give you access to the dev chat on discord, but despite asking a few times and paying for almost half a year, it just never happened. So I couldn’t take them seriously.
Since I blocked .ml I can’t leave a reply on the original message, and I’m not going to unblock them just because.
Im okay, was gonna donate. But not if it supports lemmy.ml
I was thinking long and hard about this to form an opinion, but my answer is no.
The final decission point was: I’m from Slovakia, it’s no secret that Russia would love to take us under their sphere of influence. You and your instance is not only supporting this, you’re actively propagating this. In fact, I’m pretty sure if Russian soldiers would be at my doorstep, threatening my family, you and your instance would be cheering. And when I would realize, that I actively supported this, that would break me.
If you’re about to publish your work for free, I gladly use it as long as it’s run by good people like lemmy.world. This way you get no support from me. If I’d pay you, I don’t know what part of my support would end up in .ml instance which I see as a propaganda machine against countries like mine. And even if you say that none of my money would end up there, I kind of don’t want to support you as a human being. I won’t pay your salary so you have energy to do what you do on .ml instance.
If Lemmy as a project dies, so be it. Foss world can always spark successful forks (see OpenElec vs LibreElec) and alternatives like PieFed already exist
I used to put up $50/mo to Hexbear, until they banned me for defending the DSA.
So far, the politics on this community have been dogshit. But the moderation has been generally fair, friendly, and functional. To you, I say, Shut Up and Take My Money. Thanks for letting me continue my shitposting habits, even if we’ve agreed to disagree.
deleted by creator
Is it possible donate to Lemmy development without contributing to Lemmy.ml?
The comments are a full microcosm showcasing why Lemmy will stay underground and it will never overtake reddit
Donated, I’d rather be on a foss platform that can defederate/block bad faith interlocutors than a corpo platform that forces their anti user pro monetization shit on everyone who uses their platform.
Ew no. Rather see dev work on Lemmy stop than support tankies 🤢
Then what are you doing here?
Threadiverse != Lemmy
Off topic, but can we please stop calling it the “Threadiverse”? Meta had no hand in developing it, and don’t think associating with them is a good look
Threads when talking about discussion threading goes back to usenet & email group days. Meta co-opted the term.
Yes, but prior to Meta creating Threads, it was known as the “Fediverse”. Nobody called it the “Threadiverse” before Meta tried to encroach.
No. We very much did call the post/discussion format of Lemmy/Kbin/etc Threadiverse before threads was a thing or started federating. You are extremely confidently incorrect. You can easily test and prove this to yourself using a simple search.
Fediverse encompasses all connected Activitypub services. Lemmy/Kbin/mbin/pifed is the Threadiverse.
You’re on sh.itjust.works . The other poster is on lemmy.ca .
That’s both Lemmy.Never claimed it wasn’t?
Then support mbin and piefed?
No ads and no algorithm isn’t free.
Folks, open your wallets and throw a few bucks Lemmy’s way. I’m a monthly donor myself, and I consider it money well-spent compared to the shit show that is every other social media platform.
Done. Lemmy is too good not to get properly funded.
