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 update is what made me setup a recurring donation.
Thanks :)
This should probably be documented on the open collective page.
Right, updated.
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 ☺️
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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.
.world and .ee must be benefitting financially from your work; are they helping at all?
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.
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
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?
There are donors from both of their communities
Donated , kudos for XMR option
Donated what I could on a hard month (something something insurance company something something half of my salary), but with heart. If the fundraiser persist, I’ll be glad to donate more next month!
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.
Featured, best of luck to the donation drive. The lemmy developers do good work and deserve good pay
I just noticed that featuring will only pin to “All” and not “Local”. It is helpful to cross-post to a local community to pin it more visibly.
Good point, thanks
Has nutomic ever apologized for his transphobia? That behavior should never be rewarded
Best of luck raising funds! 👍 Pinned for extra visibility.
SCAM!
Edit: Not a scam. The mods responded to me. I apologize, I’m paranoid.
no
You’re correct.
??? what platform do you think lemmy.world runs?
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.
Welcome to the club. And it’s very much not limited only to internet forums.
It happens :p
The internet has made people truly paranoid lol.
We’re currently living in the Grift Age of civilization.
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.
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:
Thanks for the reminder!
Best of luck!
Thanks!
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 think we’d all prefer you just post and spread the community that way.
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 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.
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!
