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 :)
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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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
Can I donate only to Dessalines and not you? Cause fuck transphobes
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.
Oh no wont someone please consider trans peoples reputation from a transphobic 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.
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.
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.
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?
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”.
beaver@lemmy.ca deleted their account so it can’t be unbanned but have many, many unbanned alts like sunshine@lemmy.ca who is not banned
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Really wish Nutomic would apologize for it, it’s depressing.
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.
you can do better
The transgender topic is much more complex and more controversial than I knew at the time.
not an apology. wish you were still banned.
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
Not click and scroll, just scroll, the link is to a comment on this page.
That sounds like a your app problem. Try using a browser.
Are we to assume you think this is an apology?
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.
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.
Sent a modest amount of XMR (do so from time to time). Thank you for all the work!
Youre welcome!
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.
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.
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
“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.
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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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
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.
It’s not like they’re putting demands on .world to tone down the liberalism.
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.
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!
Donated via LiberaPay for 1 year.
